What to know about web fonts

Some quick research notes on fonts, how they work on the web, and what performance and experience tradeoffs exist

• General resources and introductions to the concepts to know
  • Zach Leatherman’s blog is a great place to start
  • Lee Robinson on web fonts in 2021 has seemingly one difference of opinion: font-display: optional; is the best choice (vs swap)
  • Font Falsehoods
  • Technical aspects from Google’s web.dev
  • Robin Rendle on why fonts are worth paying attention to
• How to choose a font
  • By flowchart
  • By expert (Typewolf)
• Tools for typography
  • Typeset, an NPM package for a professional look - I haven’t tried this but looks interesting
  • Wakamai Fondue - /what can my font do/
  • Fonttools - a python library that has an ffmpeg for fonts vibe
  • Subfont Netlify build plugin - Strip out all the unused characters from your web fonts on each build for maximum performance. Very nice, but I’ve had some issues running out of memory