Web Fonts - Computerphile

In the first days of the web, font choice was down to the viewer - Dr Tamir Hassan on how things developed.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[GeorgeGraves]

You guys do a great job of interviewing people that are *not* normally on camera, and a bit awkward at it. Hats off to you.

[AgentM]

So satisfying seeing the sky outside slowly dimming from bright to darkness :D

[FusionDeveloper]

Monospaced fonts are my favorite type and Consolas is my favorite one so far. However, other fonts can fit more words in a smaller space and are easier to read.

[sirkowski]

Remember when people would ask you to download a specific font to properly enjoy their personal website? I bet nobody ever bothered.

[Robs_fan]

The guy is obviously very knowledgeable but really needs to work on his presentation skills; it was difficult to follow. More clarity and confidence would help a lot.

[PaulaJBean]

Let's not forget the most beautiful webfont of them all: Comic Sans MS! This surely is the greatest contribution of Microsoft to mankind.

[PrivateSi]

20 years ago in a graphics engine I developed I rendered each used font character at each used size into a compressed cache and added effects like anti-aliasing, border, colour/fill, bold and italic effects during screen drawing. If the system had over 256mb main memory it would build up a cache of effected fonts on top... Each char took up a few bytes. Now-a-days with higher resolutions sending pre-rendered font sets char by char as needed would take more bandwidth - but we have plenty more so no problem. It means as long as the server supports the font all clients get to see the same styled text but do not have to download a whole font set (that may not even be freely available for their platform).

[peteranderson]

Wait, so the W3C threw a hissy fit over DRM in fonts but is completely ok with including it as a web standard for streaming video?

[belstar]

Its interesting how something as basic as fonts is such a big deal in computing

[makharsa]

Why do all of computerphile videos lack the auto subtitle feature? do you guys turn it off or something?, I mean even if it is not accurate it is really helpful for all nonnative speakers

[MJay_]

Wow, it took a full day to tape this. Looking forward to getting more videos from Dr.Tamir Hassan.

[SergeMatveenko]

Another great subject is professional monospace fonts. Including their readability, distinction between "1Il" and "O0" characters, and making them look nice and attractive even after using them for 12 hours a day.

[scienteer]

Really interesting. Well done to Dr Hassan for this. I'd be really intersted in more videos on fonts. My memories of 90's website fonts was flashing text against horrific backgrounds. Arghh.

[devttyUSB]

Great video! Thanks for this clear explanation of how fonts on the web came to existence!

[power-max]

9:20 Ummm.... If we can make "boldness" variable, then we can make it also Animatable! God it would be just like the <blink> tag that used to exist on older IE browsers!

[marsgal]

Another angle on the idea of "tunable" fonts is Knuth's work on Metafont. Capture the essence of the shape then turn knobs to make the font you want.

[jndominica]

Georgia and Verdana are real works of pixel art, considering how good they look on screen in more than 1 height. Most Monotype fonts were also very good.

I'm not a fan of modern embedded web fonts because they tend to be optimized for Cleartype (subpixel with rainbow edges), and lack the hinting for monochrome or greyscale rendering. Also websites sometimes force webfonts for unneeded international characters (such as the language selector on Wikipedia), impacting performance. In Opera, the webfonts were implemented in a way that they are actually loaded by the OS, and the files in the cache would sometimes remain locked until reboot.

The option to disable web fonts is hidden in advanced settings of a browser. This comes at the price of losing some navigation icons that tend to be presented as text glyphs nowadays.

I like how Adobe deals with fonts, rendering them internally and at better sharpness, independent of OS settings. And upon closing of PDF or Photoshop all fonts and related code are unloaded.

[VorpalGun]

The guy is swaying and so is the camera. I'm getting some motion sickness from this video, and I don't usually get motion sickness... Consider a tripod?

[baconology]

This guy is great. This is what youtube is about.

[xxheartcakexx]

I have the feeling this guy isn’t actually nervous but it trying to suppress a stutter. Mostly because his speech flows pretty smoothly if he were to omit all the filler words. I wish I could ask him