Blog.Kernest.com

I’m pleased to announced Kernest.com is now selling Chank Diesel’s Chumley family.

Chumley is a clean, fun, hand-written sans serif that comes in 3 weights (medium, ’skinny’, and ‘fatty’) and feels right at home in web comics. Starting at $15/website/year.

Yes, I said ’starting’.

Chumley is the first font family offered with Kernest’s new ‘Pay What You Want’ pricing.

Show Chank how perfect Chumley is for your project – add a zero….or 2.

All prices are still per year-per website.

A nice reminder from James Puckett over on ilovetypography.com

“I’m surprised that you didn’t mention Kernest.com, a type service that already works and has dozens of free fonts available for use, along with my Downturn Family for commercial licensing. Everyone else is issuing press releases and running private beta tests, but Kernest is already up and running and ready to license commercial type.” – James Puckett

Thanks James.

A question that came up last week at The Foundation and over the weekend at TypeCon:

When a web page is printed – is the web font printed also?

Great question.

From my tests this weekend – No. Not even if the CSS is media="print".

This means the font rendering is specific to the browser and not installed on the system. It also means that a Web Use Only license means Web Use Only.

Update 24 July 2009:
Safari 4.0.2 prints @font-face linked fonts.
As John Daggot describes below, Firefox 3.5.1 does not because of a bug.

As expected, less than 24 hours in the private preview and some minor – albeit noticeable – bugs have been identified and eradicated.

Big thanks to Ralf Hermann and Bram Pitoyo for identifying the browsers Kernest should have been working with – but wasn’t.

All better now.

Including confirmed compatibility in Stainless.app and Firefox Minefield.

Additional preview emails are trickling out add your email to the announcement list to get one.

Phew.

I just send out the first batch of emails announcing the Kernest private preview that will be running from now until the Public Demo on July 16th.

I’m excited.

Second bath will go out in a few days, if you want in – add your email to the announcement list.

Thanks.

All the prototypes of Kernest were using Javascript for a couple of small capabilities that it allows.

But I wasn’t happy about it.

It felt heavy, opaque, hack-y, and against the web-standards spirit of the @font-face declaration.

Over the past few days, I’ve re-worked the system to be more web-friendly, more transparent.

I’m much happier with this solution all around.

If you’d like to kick the tires of Kernest in a few weeks, add your email to the Announcement list in the left-hand column.

Many of the assets browsers understand have specific MIME types to provide hints to the web browser (and email clients) on how to process them. Everything from images to javascripts to Microsoft Word docs have a corresponding MIME type

A basic example of this: PDFs might be rendered via a browser plugin or the browser might hand it over to Preview.app.

With the adoption of @font-face and the corresponding proliferation of embedded fonts – is a font-specific MIME type needed?

Anne van Kesteren asked this question back in 2008 – and the closest answer I can find is ‘application/octet-stream‘ might be fine (since it already exists) but it definitely doesn’t feel clean.

J Wynia pointed me to OpenFontLibrary – looks like a giant leap forward for the FOSS-ing font movement (much needed for @font-face to catch on) and my YouTube of Typefaces notion.

The goal of Kernest.com is to track the adoption of the @font-face CSS3 rule.

Browsers known to support @font-face; Safari 3.1 or newer, Firefox 3.1 or newer

Who else is tracking @font-face?
Ralf Herrmann’s webfonts.info wiki