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 […]
Author Archives: Matt
Better Google Fonts
July 18, 2011 – 9:46 pm
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
June 13, 2011 – 9:56 am
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
June 6, 2011 – 10:28 pm
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
June 6, 2011 – 10:26 am
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 […]