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AltFontPrev
Typography on the Web is one of the most constraining features of the medium. Designers who wish to stray away from the safety of Verdana, Georgia, and co. generally have three options:
- Image Replacement
- Flash Replacement
- Taking their chances with CSS
The downsides of image and Flash replacement are well documented. Saving headings or snippets of text as images quickly gets tiresome on sites with a steady stream of new content and, unless used carefully, can cause problems for search engines and screen readers. Replacement techniques such as sIFR solve these problems gracefully but introduce the need for Flash to be installed and JavaScript enabled.
Until @font-face becomes widely accepted by browser developers and the community, declaring anything but web-safe fonts in CSS will remain a risky business. Choosing suitable alternatives for a font that looks great but is unlikely to be installed can be difficult. Style, x-height, character width and weight must all be taken into account to ensure less-fortunate visitors receive as similar an experience as possible. It’s all too easy to focus on the first sans-serif of a font-family, simply chuck in a quick line-up of verdana, arial, sans-serif to follow, and not consider how much wider Verdana is than your preferred font or how much rounder Arial is.
So, time to release something I’ve had in mind for a while…
AltFontPrev is a JavaScript bookmarklet that allows you to preview how any website would look if a particular font was not available.…
Merlijn Van Holder
Sam Rayner
