October 2010 Meeting Report: Google Fonts

At our October meeting, we finished up on the @fonts selector by doing a live demonstration of how to incorporate a font into your page and then serve the font to your reader. We highlighted Font Squirrel, a site that is a source for fonts in multiple formats plus the style sheets to load the fonts into your pages.

We then looked at Google Fonts, a new technique for serving up fonts. Google Labs has an introduction to this technology at Google Font API. Another good introduction is A Guide to Google Font API at Six Revisions. To see the fonts available, go to the Google Font Directory.

October 2010 Meeting Announcement

The next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, October 16, at our usual 9-10 am hour.

Following our theme this year of website makeovers, we will continue on the topic of fonts. Last month we looked at the @font selector, a CSS way to supply fonts to a user's browser. This month, we will finish up with @font, including a look at some sites for downloadable fonts. We will then move on to a new technology from Google for downloading fonts to a user's browser.

Depending on time, we will also check out some new websites that have useful information or tutorials relating to CSS.

September 2010 Meeting Report: The @font Tag

At the first meeting of this season, we looked at techniques for avoiding the limitations of web-safe fonts. Generally, we can't use a particular font on a webpage unless we have confidence that users have the font on their computers.

We reviewed some font replacement techniques that have their own limitations. We then looked at the @font tag, which allows the web developer to upload fonts to the server to be downloaded by the user with the page itself. The obvious limitation is that one has to have the rights to use a font in that manner, and the tag can be tricky to use across browsers.

Some sites about @font that might be of interest are:

• CSS 3 Font Face | Zen Elements
• @font-face - MDC
• How to use CSS @font-face

We also looked at a site suggested by Don Arrowsmith for checking on browser compatibility for new web technologies like CSS3 and HTML5: When can I use....