Web Safe Fonts Beta 2 is Live!
Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2
Last week at the Voices that Matter Web Design conference in San Francisco, I unveiled the latest incarnation of the Web Safe Fonts list during my presentation “Many Types, Many Faces: Web Typography Beyond Arial and Times and Georgia.” I created the first beta version of the list over a year ago to show all of the fonts that are likely to be pre-installed on Mac and Windows computers, with a rough rating of the likely hood a given font is installed based on the source of the install.
The Web Safe Fonts list has gotten some attention, but I’ve held off really promoting it until I got some basic functionality in place. With that done, I’m ready to launch Web Safe Fonts-Beta 2 which now includes:
- Column Sort: Organize fonts by name, available weights and styles, OS, and install likely hood.
- Graphic Samples: A screen capture of the full alpha-numeric glyph set for the given font. There are still a couple of samples missing, but I should have those in place soon. Thanks to Mauro Scappa at MediaBarn for help with the Windows screenshot.
- Other refinements: The list is now in an array to allow sorting and I separated the OS and rank into separated columns.
At the conference, I was not able to only talk about the list, but got some great feedback and ideas for some new features I need to include, as well as some great news about a new project. I can’t say much about it right now, but I hope to make an announcement soon.
I’m by no means finished with the list, and hope to make more improvements as time allows including:
- List Unix fonts.
- Add Generic font-family names. This can be problematic since there are no hard and fast rules, but I’m working on it.
- Add Lorem Ipsum and font-family list features. This will allow visitors to create a custom list of fonts they want to use and preview all of them in Greek text.
- Add notes on font legibility and size constraints.
- Continue to vet list for accuracy.
If you are using the list and/or have any feedback, please let me know.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment