LWN: Comments on "Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts"

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

TRS-80 — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 13:43:28 +0000

On my Android phone (SGS2) I see FOUT fairly frequently, and it's often more than a flash - 5 seconds or longer.

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

JanC_ — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 15:01:02 +0000

It's probably more a problem of typing it than of displaying/storing it (not all platforms have good support for entering special characters on keyboards that have no "native" support for them).

Also, most programming languages still don't support non-ASCII identifiers, so in practice they would have to replace the special characters anyway...

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

Baylink — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 16:22:39 +0000

For what it's worth, I have *never* seen FOUT; FOUC ("flash of unstyled content", presumably selected for it's resemblance to the cussword) is pretty common.

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

k8to — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 11:12:23 +0000

I remember outline fonts in some packages, but at system level? I don't think that happened on 68k machines anyway. I can't speak for os4 etc.

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

jonabbey — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 19:54:28 +0000

I haven't seen multi-colored fonts anywhere since I got rid of my Amiga 1000 back in 1992. I don't know that they ever made the jump to non-bitmap fonts.

Zopfli & Brotli

robbe — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 12:20:14 +0000

I am confused about the relative performance of these algortihms. The article states that Brotli is comparable to LZMA. The only reference I could find was in the Zopfli paper, where it beats other zlib-compatible algorithms ("3.7-8.3 % smaller than gzip -9") -- but this is no match for LZMA.

Mudding the waters even further is the fact that the WOFF2 format seems to offer a choice between zlib and LZMA.

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

robbe — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 12:12:04 +0000

That a project concerned with /font/ issues still can't use a name going outside the ASCII range is somewhat depressing.

Are search engines unable to find "Brötli" if I search for "Brotli"?

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

n8willis — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:17:25 +0000

Alakuijala and Szabadka are from Google's Zurich office, and yes, the names are both intentionally taken from breads. Someone asked about that on the W3C list. Love it or hate it, "compress" and "deflate" were already taken....

Nate

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

Shugyousha — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 10:40:33 +0000

As a fellow Swiss, I still think it's cute even without the umlauts.

Progress on smaller and more colorful fonts

Seegras — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 09:50:21 +0000

Zopfli and Brotli? That's like mis-spelled "Zöpfli" (small braided bread) and "Brötli" (small bread) in swiss german. Sounds extremely stupid.