Author Archives: Matt

Improve Windows Type Rendering With ttfautohint

In a stroke of genius, Wern­er Lem­berg has start­ed the ttfau­to­hint project, which repur­pos­es FreeType’s auto­hint­ing sys­tem to auto­mat­i­cal­ly hint True­Type fonts for improved Win­dows ren­der­ing. While no auto­hin­ter will be able to match the eye and skills of a man­u­al hin­ter, ttfau­to­hint pro­vides real world improve­ments, some­times dra­mat­i­cal­ly. For exam­ple, I’m work­ing as a […]

Better Google Fonts

Google Web Fonts is an awe­some source of free, open source fonts hooked up to a world-class CDN. It’s also, sad­ly, filled with one-off nov­el­ty fonts vying for the title of “the new Com­ic Sans.” I quick­ly dis­cov­ered that a good met­ric for high­­er-qual­i­­ty fonts was the pres­ence of at least one alter­nate. The Google […]

Environment Canada Mobile

The state of mobile weath­er apps isn’t awe­some. I find that it’s even worse in Cana­da, where weath­er data is sourced through non-Cana­di­an providers such as Yahoo (iOS’s built-in weath­er app) or AccuWeath­er, nei­ther of which I find tend to pro­vide very good Cana­di­an fore­cast data. Envi­ron­ment Cana­da is my go-to fore­cast provider, but their site […]

FontFriend 3.2 Released: Now With More Google

When I released Font­Friend 3.1, I men­tioned that Google Web Fonts didn’t have a prop­er API, mak­ing things dif­fi­cult. They still don’t have a pub­lic API, but on Thurs­day I was giv­en “trust­ed tester” access to the new API. It won’t look that much dif­fer­ent, but there’ll be a few fonts work­ing now that weren’t […]

Some Cranky WordPress Plugins

It looks like I may carve out a niche for cranky Word­Press plu­g­ins. This could either be seen as a per­son­al­i­ty flaw or as a per­fect fit with­in open-source cul­ture. In either case, Word­Press makes it easy for irri­ta­ble peo­ple to release plu­g­ins to change what they don’t like about it. I’ve done so twice […]