Lyncis.info

It looks like Chrome is hiding something from us — in its about:memory report — fairly counting memory usage of Firefox (marked orange), it shows us only the part of truth (marked green). What are these «hidden» processes, that Chromium shy of (marked red)? Looks like that «hidden» instances eat much more memory, that Chrome shows.

During taking the screenshot, there was only one Chrome window running, as well as one window of Firefox. It is Ubuntu 9.10, Chromium 5.0.343.0.

While there are lots of free, open or just “available for web-embedding” fonts, most of them are ready to display only strict set of “latin-1″ characters. So, I’ve spent little time and found several fonts that have some Unicode support — Cyrillic symbols for rendering Cyrillic content (Ukrainian, Russian, Belorussian, Kazakh etc.). These fonts have GPL, Apache or OpenFont licensing.

So, here they go:

• Serifs: Biolinum, Charis SIL, CMU Concrete, CMU Typewriter Mono, Heuristica, Liberation Serif and Linux Libertine.
• and Sans-serifs: CMU Bright, Droid Sans, Graublau, Liberation Mono, Liberation Sans and M⁺ typefaces: 1C Light, 1P Regular, 1P Thin and 2P Regular.

Be careful, this page is showing live embedding examples here and now, so you probably should look at this page at my site, because only there fonts are embedded. And notice — these fonts took together near 15MiB.

Also, to see the examples, you should know, that font-embedding (OpenType and TrueType) works in next browsers: Firefox/3.5+, Opera/10+, Safari/3.1+, Google Chrome (Chromium) (how to make Google Chrome display remote fonts with @font-face) — all modrn browsers, except of Internet Explorer — it is able to draw fonts in it’s own format Embedded OpenType. Converting tool from Microsoft is free, but I don’t know yet if there are licensing issues with the convertion, but I’m going to research this. So you’d better catch my RSS.

Rendering issues on different OS and browsers

Different OS — different font rendering. Also, try this page in different browsers to see what’s going on. Moreover, remote fonts are not system-wide fonts, so rendering is really different.

IMHO, best font rendering is MacOS and Safari. Next is going Chrome in Linux, which is slightly better than Firefox and Opera in same Linux. And finally — Windows, where XP is the worst renderer.

In order to see the difference (or see the fonts, if you have Internet Explorer or old version of other browser), I’ve included “Reference Rendering” image near each font. Just click on it and see the difference, probably you use not the best browser, and missing something beautiful in the modern web. The reference pictures are in PNG format and made from this page in Chromium/4.0.220.1 (Developer build 27609) in Ubuntu Linux 9.04 Jaunty.

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Unfortunately, the might and powerful his magesty Google Chrome or Chromium is unable to download and display custom fonts. BTW, its closest relative, Apple Safari, which is also based on WebKit, able to display fonts from third version.

Fortunately, this is just an option by default. You just have to say it your desire to see downloadable fonts, via command line. Read the rest of this entry »