Also, there is an extra DNS round trip by using an external web service. And I hate seeing JavaScript crawl into my <head> tag - certainly not for a web font.
I hope so! More competition means more awesome free fonts for me. I hope they compete bad. Some web fonts render terribly across platforms. Windows still has terrible awful horrible handling of fonts so anything these companies can do to improve that in web fonts would be much appreciated.
That's what Edge Code is. Edge is their collection of developer-focused tool and services. Basically, they're trying to shake the stigma of Dreamweaver.
Also, because it's implied otherwise, it should be stated that Brackets is an Adobe-created/-owned project. The two are still quite tied together, as Brackets improvements are pushed into Edge Code releases.
Actually, Brackets itself started inside Adobe by a group of employees, so Edge Code is their distribution package as much as Chrome is to Chromium. I can't see it in a negative light, I think they're getting this right.
No problem, I would have suggested a helpful correction but I was completely lost. On that note, I just though how funny it would be if autocorrect just had a WTF? when it was completely lost.
--
Edge Web Fonts gives you access to a vast web font library made possible by contributions from Adobe, Google, and designers around the world. The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability. Plus, it’s free!
--
I don't know the current state of things, but a failed font download used to result in blank/transparent text in some browsers, ignoring the fallback font.
TypeKit has a lot of countermeasures to ensure that the fonts are used according to the license, and not by anyone who isn't allowed to or through proxy's or something. I don't know the details but had a run-in with this in the past, resolved soon by customer support. I'm guessing Adobe didn't care for creating a second serving system to serve up these fonts, or the licenses are still restrictive that it requires some added logic.
I abandoned Google fonts because of the annoying latency / flash on refresh. The Adobe fonts are smooth on my dev machine. That might be worth the difference under the hood.
"In addition, Adobe will be applying its considerable font expertise to improving and optimizing a number of the open source fonts that are available in both Google Web Fonts and Edge Web Fonts. The teams from Typekit, Adobe Type, and Google Web Fonts are working to identify which fonts will benefit the most from our attention, and how we can best approach improving their rendering and performance."
Helping to improve fonts that are not just freely available, but freely available on services other than your own? It's almost like I'm starting to feel goodwill towards Adobe. It's rather strange.
Back in the day they did fight Fontshop in court to make it possible to embed fonts (in PDF-files). Today there are still fontdesigners that charge an extra fee if you use theirfonts in things like Flash. Or just forbid it. Yeah, I'm looking atyou HouseIndustries...
I find Adobe remarkably inconsistent. The people behind their most famous product line, Creative Suite, seem to consistently produce poor quality software full of awkward limitations and oversights backed by terrible customer support, whose only redeeming feature is that since they basically killed off or bought all of the serious competition years ago everyone else's software is actually worse.
On the other hand, Adobe's typography people seem to be consistently good at producing high quality work, selling it at reasonable prices, and offering it on reasonable terms. Consequently, probably 90% of the money I've spent on serious fonts over the years has gone to Adobe, because they blow away the the-90s-called-they-want-their-printers-back silliness of certain other well known foundries, who either haven't noticed that we use fonts more on-screen than in print these days or who shamelessly advertise one price when the actual price to buy a useful product is presumably higher (presumably, because they never seem to tell you how much those extra permissions will actually cost).
Priceless!
"Our mission: move the web forward and give web designers and developers the best tools and services in the world."
And then: "Download a PDF version of this document (PDF, 47 KB)"
Yeah, but it is in Adobe's interest to have you download a pdf that happens to use a pointless feature that only exists in the version of acrobat the came out three weeks ago and no other pdf viewer supports.
It seems that only the example on their site includes 'default' character set. Note that, though, sadly not all fonts have different than latin-1, or partial latin-1-ext.
Neat, but I don't understand why Adobe would do this. I already use Adobe Typekit, and $50/year gives me access to a huge library of fonts at an unlimited number of websites. For my purposes, I'm tempted to stop paying even that totally reasonable, meager amount and just use this free offering instead.
After following most of the links on the page, I can't find any mention of limits on pageviews or traffic. On the surface of it, that makes their free offering a little bit better than their paid offering.
Still no VAG Rundschrift. I have seen people request it on Typekit for years. Adobe is the licensor for this font, I have no idea why they haven't listened and either start offering it as a web font or explain why they won't/can't.
Careful, you can't legally serve these fonts with your app, you can only link to them. Am I the only one who finds this a big deal? It means you can't control the uptime of your fonts, and it seems like it would complicate development when you're offline, too.
From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to turn fonts into a "service" by hyping the hosting aspect. It would be like if jQuery said you can't serve jquery.js from your web server, you can only link to it, and then they start offering paid versions of jQuery.
I realize fonts are a commercial product, but my understanding is that Google Web Fonts really are free to use in your apps, whereas this is a free service. According to the terms, it is illegal to "retransmit" the "Service Materials".
I'm not sure I understand where the fonts on that page are coming from. They don't seem to be the serious Adobe professional fonts, many of which are available from font-as-a-service providers at a cost. Rather, they seem to be a lot of familiar things people are already using via Google Web Fonts and other free sources: Arvo, PT Sans, League Gothic, etc. Some (all?) of these are available under quite open licences, so I'm not sure what right Adobe would have to restrict those anyway.
This is trash. A repackaging of a lot of free OFL type that's already out there, but new and improved with restricted licensing, JS dependency, and relying on Adobe.
Too bad this is what hit the top slot. They also announced the release of the open source code and its monospace variant. I'm using it in elementary OS and it looks fantastic in Sublime Text and terminal.
If Adobe were really interested improving the web typography either Myriad Pro would be in the free set (it isn't) or they would change the default font in their creative suites to one of the free fonts (they haven't)
I no longer trust, nor like Adobe. And I don't think I ever will again. I genuinely want to see them fail in everything they do and I care not one jot for the men and women who work there or their families. I root for Pixelmator, I salute Apple's stance on flash and even wanted Silverlight to give Adobe a run for it's money.
There is a point to this rant. I have used Adobe products my entire working life. I loved Adobe and the products they made. But now...? I am what happens when you treat your users like shit, and everyone else like idiots.
Fortunatly for me, my inflated opinion and militant outlook is made more tenable when they keep releasing turds like this.
Sorry, but no, there was no point to that rant. I'm no Adobe fan either, but your comment adds no value; it isn't a specific criticism, just being angry. If you dislike them, just don't use their products and move on.
This is frustrating. I've spent 10 minutes on their site, checked out the links, and still can't figure out how to browse their font collection. Am I supposed to sign up with this Edge tool to do that? By contrast, see http://www.google.com/webfonts. You land there and start working.
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadIs there going to be a new competition over who has the 'cutting-edge' fonts?
http://blog.typekit.com/2012/09/24/introducing-adobe-edge-we...
With that said and paranoia of external asset serving/hosting, does anyone know if these fonts can be self-hosted?
Also, because it's implied otherwise, it should be stated that Brackets is an Adobe-created/-owned project. The two are still quite tied together, as Brackets improvements are pushed into Edge Code releases.
http://blog.typekit.com/2011/10/03/adobe-acquires-typekit/
"Adobe Edge Tools & Services: New tools and services for a beautiful, modern web."
"Edge Web Fonts is conveniently built into Edge Code today and will be available in Edge Reflow and other Edge Tools & Services soon."
I'm reading all this and I still have no idea what Edge is or why I should care.
A much more informative link for the HN audience is this: http://www.edgefonts.com/
-- Edge Web Fonts gives you access to a vast web font library made possible by contributions from Adobe, Google, and designers around the world. The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability. Plus, it’s free! --
Neither do the people who wrote it, I can assure you :)
"The fonts are served by Typekit, so you can be sure of high performance and stability."
This changes everything
~jk
I thought fonts basically just vector graphics. Since these are just java-script files, how are they being distributed? How do these work?
google: embed css link, the negotiation which one to download is made server-side
adobe: embed js link, the negotiation which one to download is made client-side
Considering this is built on top of Typekit — which does support Web Font Loader — this is surprising.
[1] - https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader
Helping to improve fonts that are not just freely available, but freely available on services other than your own? It's almost like I'm starting to feel goodwill towards Adobe. It's rather strange.
On the other hand, Adobe's typography people seem to be consistently good at producing high quality work, selling it at reasonable prices, and offering it on reasonable terms. Consequently, probably 90% of the money I've spent on serious fonts over the years has gone to Adobe, because they blow away the the-90s-called-they-want-their-printers-back silliness of certain other well known foundries, who either haven't noticed that we use fonts more on-screen than in print these days or who shamelessly advertise one price when the actual price to buy a useful product is presumably higher (presumably, because they never seem to tell you how much those extra permissions will actually cost).
Prepare for some resource hogging :)
Fonts provided by Google are better in character range coverage. Anyway, thanks Adobe.
Also: http://jsfiddle.net/6zUQu/1/
It seems that only the example on their site includes 'default' character set. Note that, though, sadly not all fonts have different than latin-1, or partial latin-1-ext.
After following most of the links on the page, I can't find any mention of limits on pageviews or traffic. On the surface of it, that makes their free offering a little bit better than their paid offering.
Adobe® Edge Web Fonts: Paid for graciously by the users of Typekit.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/vag-rundschrift/
From a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense to turn fonts into a "service" by hyping the hosting aspect. It would be like if jQuery said you can't serve jquery.js from your web server, you can only link to it, and then they start offering paid versions of jQuery.
I realize fonts are a commercial product, but my understanding is that Google Web Fonts really are free to use in your apps, whereas this is a free service. According to the terms, it is illegal to "retransmit" the "Service Materials".
The website itself has hardly any frills.
Thanks.
http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html
There is a point to this rant. I have used Adobe products my entire working life. I loved Adobe and the products they made. But now...? I am what happens when you treat your users like shit, and everyone else like idiots.
Fortunatly for me, my inflated opinion and militant outlook is made more tenable when they keep releasing turds like this.
[1] http://html.adobe.com/edge/webfonts/#edgeWebFonts