Fonts in IP4

[Morgin]

I took a quick spin through the blogs thinking you guys may have already discussed this, but couldn't find anything.

One thing that I think has really helped improve the aesthetics of the web generally, and is a trend I'm quite keen to seen continue to be embraced, is the font renaissance that has led to web design being particularily focused on clean, readable fonts.

Has there been any talk of integration in IP4 of options like google font, or fontface, or things of that nature? I know it's possible to do some of this as a mod/custom skin, but having integration in the base software (especially ip.content) to almost force people to think of their font choices would perhaps be a good thing (or maybe not?)

Interested in hearing people's thoughts on the current state of fonts and how they could be used in IP4 to really enhance the design and readability of content.

[Cyrem]

You can just insert the link into the default theme template & change the css font-family. Literally a 2 line change. Adding new settings for font won't be much of a time saver.

[chromaniac]

Yup. I find it quite annoying on vB and on IPB that the typefaces have not been given much thought. Sure I can modify templates. Sure I can use Google Fonts. But the forum should have modern typefaces that look good and are easy to read as well.

[CalendarOfUpdates]

Yup. I find it quite annoying on vB and on IPB that the typefaces have not been given much thought. Sure I can modify templates. Sure I can use Google Fonts. But the forum should have modern typefaces that look good and are easy to read as well.

And that falls into the category of personal preference. The platform allows you to adjust that to your preferences.

[Rikki]

It's something we've considered strongly (and continue to consider). I would personally love to do it. There's numerous challenges though - first, if we include a font, we need one with an appropriate license. Something like Open Sans would seem to be a good fit. But then consider we need to support not just Latin characters, but Russian, Chinese, Arabic and so on because we have customers across the world. Suddenly the fonts aren't really viable to include because they're huge or simply don't support those character sets.

We could build something in that uses Google Fonts or TypeKit (which we use on our own website) - but at that point, it'd be easier to just include a tag in your skin with support for whichever character sets your community needs.

Something we could look at, I guess, is a simple theme setting where you can paste in the tag that TypeKit, Google WebFonts etc. gives you, and then another setting that lets you enter the CSS font name. We wouldn't be able to ship with a webfont being used for the above reasons, but it would give an upgrade-safe way for you to easily use a new font from one of those services.

[chromaniac]

That would be very nice. Right now, this feature is available in some skins. Uniformity would be nice to have. Thank you for considering it!

[Morgin]

It's something we've considered strongly (and continue to consider). I would personally love to do it. There's numerous challenges though - first, if we include a font, we need one with an appropriate license. Something like Open Sans would seem to be a good fit. But then consider we need to support not just Latin characters, but Russian, Chinese, Arabic and so on because we have customers across the world. Suddenly the fonts aren't really viable to include because they're huge or simply don't support those character sets.

We could build something in that uses Google Fonts or TypeKit (which we use on our own website) - but at that point, it'd be easier to just include a tag in your skin with support for whichever character sets your community needs.

Something we could look at, I guess, is a simple theme setting where you can paste in the tag that TypeKit, Google WebFonts etc. gives you, and then another setting that lets you enter the CSS font name. We wouldn't be able to ship with a webfont being used for the above reasons, but it would give an upgrade-safe way for you to easily use a new font from one of those services.

Thanks for the response! I always forget about the language issues. Hadn't really considered that.

[JoshB84]

Wow, I was just searching to see if there was a topic about this. I was going to ask the same question about IPB 4.0 and google fonts.

[Amerrrr]

Wow, I was just searching to see if there was a topic about this. I was going to ask the same question about IPB 4.0 and google fonts.

Why can't everybody be like this guy and google first..

[chromaniac]

heh. that reminds of my other problem with forum software... integrated search is horrible. i myself use google custom site search on my own forum. works fantastic.

[Kit_L]

On 5/2/2014 at 9:14 AM, Cyrem said:

You can just insert the link into the default theme template & change the css font-family. Literally a 2 line change. Adding new settings for font won't be much of a time saver.

Would someone care to step a newbie admin through this process; I simply want Verdana to be the site-wide font. 

TIA, KL

[Morgin]

Any update on this by chance? Did it happen to get added to the roadmap?

[Rikki]

5 minutes ago, Morgin said:

Any update on this by chance? Did it happen to get added to the roadmap?

In 4.2 we'll have built-in support for a handful of fonts from the Google Web Fonts selection, and you'll be able to set the body and headline fonts independently  

[Morgin]

2 minutes ago, Rikki said:

In 4.2 we'll have built-in support for a handful of fonts from the Google Web Fonts selection, and you'll be able to set the body and headline fonts independently  

@Joel R I spotted a leak!

[Joel R]

3 minutes ago, Morgin said:

@Joel R I spotted a leak!

I know!  I saw it too, but I already posted my big update for today.  <growl>  

[Morgin]

Just now, Joel R said:

I know!  I saw it too, but I already posted my big update for today.  <growl>  

Isn't there an "extended edit" feature???

[Joel R]

14 minutes ago, Morgin said:

Isn't there an "extended edit" feature???

Yeah but that was like a 4.1 feature and so passé 

[LiquidFractal]

On 3/21/2017 at 0:08 PM, Rikki said:

In 4.2 we'll have built-in support for a handful of fonts from the Google Web Fonts selection, and you'll be able to set the body and headline fonts independently  

Sorry for the n00b question, but: by "built-in support" do you mean that for said fonts we will no longer have to link to Google via @import url in a theme's custom.css?

And is it determined which fonts are to be included?  Personally, I'd love to see Roboto in there.

 

[Rikki]

2 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

Sorry for the n00b question, but: by "built-in support" do you mean that for said fonts we will no longer have to link to Google via @import url in a theme's custom.css?

And is it determined which fonts are to be included?  Personally, I'd love to see Roboto in there.

 

Yes, you wouldn't have to load fonts manually if it's one of the ones we include. We do include Roboto - in fact it's our new default font.

[LiquidFractal]

23 minutes ago, Rikki said:

Yes, you wouldn't have to load fonts manually if it's one of the ones we include. We do include Roboto - in fact it's our new default font.

Ohhhhhhhh 4.2 is just sounding better and better and better

[Aramaech]

Why not just have it so you can load fonts through the admin cp, and are allowed to specify which language the font is, and set a default font per language for a fall back?  
Letting people upload their own ttf files, while simply adding google web-font support to the default seems easy enough?

[opentype]

4 hours ago, RobotMonkeyHead said:

 Letting people upload their own ttf files, while simply adding google web-font support to the default seems easy enough?

It’s actually more complicated than “uploading a TTF”. That doesn’t deliver proper optimized webfont formats to different browsers, nor does it take care of proper and necessary style linking (italics/bold), nor does it guarantee that the resulting text display is legible, properly aligned (e.g. with symbols) and not cut off in certain areas. 

I have equipped all IPS sites I worked on with custom webfonts, but in each case it needed substantial work tweaking the CSS to accommodate the specific type family. There is much more to it than just to add an upload field or Google Fonts API call. 

[Rikki]

Indeed, and once you add in other services like Typekit, Fonts.net and so on, we could end up building a whole other piece of software just for specifying fonts! For now, we're going to keep it simple and see what would be worth changing once people starting using it.

[Aramaech]

As yet another coder, I know very well that it's much more complicated than a simple upload on the backend.  Pretty sure non-coders get that as well.
I was talking front end, and I thought pretty clearly.  I'm not sure where your misunderstanding of that arose.  By easy, I meant relative to the other possibilities being suggested, if that's it?  But in point of fact I'm pretty sure almost no one making suggestions on this sub-board is bothering to consider the structural and logistical efforts necessary to implement their ideas.  It's just that generally speaking, font support is relatively basic.  When people see a grand total of about 8-12 fonts, it shouldn't be surprising that they suggest various ways of implementing the part of the functionality they'll be interacting with.