Font embedding and the Mozilla project
A last few words about fonts, before I move on to images.
Just yesterday, a new client wrote to me about my first design for their property development site: “The letters of the text are a little thin, could you please make them thicker in general, it will be easier to read I suppose?”
As it happens, her eyes were spot on. I had tried the experiment of calling first for elegant Century Gothic. This is not one of the fonts guaranteed to be on every visitor’s machine—but it’s on enough of them for me to take the chance. (I’m so tired of Verdana/Geneva and Arial/Helvetica.) She evidently had the font on her machine.
My response was of course to switch to nice chunky Verdana—again. But I pondered on the assumptions behind her request. She is a partner in a big Russian property development company operating here in Spain, and they have obviously commissioned many print designers. She clearly thought I had the kind of control over fonts that a print designer takes for granted.
And why don’t I? How come Firefox and the Mozilla project are so stand-offish about embedded fonts? There is even an ‘at-rule’ in CSS (@font-face) which is supposed to allow developers to embed fonts. The Mozilla project scorns it.
Why? To go back to an earlier post of mine, my guess is that they are all principled introverts who think that questions of visual display are beneath their notice.
If only there were a few visually stimulated extroverts on the project…