Adobe Web Fonts now on WebINK

Meh. Same problems as before. No Opera support, poor quality on the fonts, not worth the cost. It's a real shame that this technology has been around for so long and it still stinks.

These are supposed to be quality fonts from major foundries. They just look awful and jagged. Don't they notice before releasing and selling this service?

Here are some examples of the jagged text.

!!!

Now just go back to verdana and lump it.

Do agree though we have been waiting, what, a decade for type! and all they can provide is that, thanks but no thanks.

what do you guys think of Google's solution?

http://www.google.com/webfonts

Suffers from much the same sort of issues

And lack of variety.

That link seems to lock Opera up.

Yes, they only have about 6 fonts.

body {font-family: sans-serif;}

body {font-family: serif;}

Leave it to the user to decide, certainly cuts down on our work

I like the way you think!

Might give that a go and when the client moans they don't like the font choice I can turn around a say curtly "well you chose them" oh would I be rofl and out of a job

A few notes:

WebINK supports Opera 11. (Or to put it another way, Opera 11 supports @font-face without major bugs.) We've updated our documention to reflect this.

Your concerns about font quality seem to reflect several issues:

1) Anti-aliasing is occurring, but only in the x-direction, not in the y-direction. This is a function of the old GDI version of Windows ClearType, and will occur with any TrueType font, even Verdana. Newer browsers using DirectWrite, such as IE9, have a version of ClearType that can do anti-aliasing in both directions.

2) In some cases you are seeing a given font below the minimum size we recommend. For example, we don't recommend using Aggie from URW below 32 px, because there are some sizes below that where rendering can get goofy. That doesn't mean the font is useless, but it's really only intended for larger display sizes. We've only recently added minimum pixel size information to our site, and we could do a better job of both displaying it, and making it something you can filter/search on.

3) Some fonts are simply a bit irregular. For example, Cadmus was intended to be reminiscent of Greek hand-lettering, so it's not a typeface you should be going to if you want something clean and optimized for legibility. That being said, quality is a significant concern for us, and our library deliberately excludes typefaces that don't meet minimum standards for character sets, spacing, outline quality, and other basic requirements.

Cheers,

T

Thomas Phinney
Sr Product Mgr, Fonts & Typography
Extensis, a division of Celartem, Inc.

Thanks for the information, Thomas. Unfortunately, if the technology doesn't have wide-spread browser support then I can't employ it (talking about the anti-aliasing, not that it just happens to work in a lot of browsers). I do believe the majority of web designers would agree and the best option is still probably some sort of image replacement. You brought up that Verdana also has the issue but you've got to admit that it doesn't suffer like the pictures I posted. Some fonts just work better for web use and others aren't worth fumbling with.

I was able to view a page with embedded fonts in IE9 and you're right it did look nice and smooth, even that Aggie font above, but another bit of unfortunateness is that IE9 is very unstable. The beta was actually more reliable than the RTM. If everyone used Mac OS or IE9 was worth using I'd surely subscribe. Until then, I'll be forced to open up Photoshop instead.

Thanks again for the information. It's cleared up a problem that's bothered me for quite some time.

Since this thread is awakened, if you have problems or don't like other selections of fonts try Font Squirrel for @font-face fonts. I've had no problems with them thus far (Chrome/Firefox/IE8) and they've got a decent selection available.

For those that are interested, I loaded the Google fonts page in Opera Mobile 6 and get regular text. Opening in my phone's built in browser (some form of webkit I believe) loads the fonts fine.