If I turn off Google Fonts in the projects settings, the only font I can choose is my local Helvetica. Where did all the usual web safe fonts go? like Arial, Verdana, Times etc.
I also noticed that if I don’t set any specific font for any element, all I have specified is Helvetica for everything. No fallback font stack at all. This seems weird to me.
You can use any web font you wish and no longer constrained by options like Arial and Verdana etc. You just have to add them. Things have moved on a bit since web safe fonts.
Absolutely, that’s not news to me. I just think that if I don’t set any fonts at all there should be a font stack like “Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif” applied and not only “Helvetica”. Isn’t that best practice any longer?
And let’s say you want to use Verdana, how do you add that one since you can’t add it as a Google Web Font (licensed by Microsoft)? Do I really have to add it as a local web font?
Even if it’s old I think it still should be at least one default serif and sans-serif font stack to choose as default.
I must confess I would never use Verdana or Arial, simply because there are countless more interesting options and many of them are free. Remember you can also download Google fonts to use as web fonts on your own server.
My understanding if that if a browser can read .woff or woff2 etc it will render whatever font you choose. I understand the principle of the fallback font but I am not sure how useful it is now. In contrast I have seen adblockers interfere with Google fonts when added by CSS.
Font stacks might be useful or not but companies like Apple and Google are still using font stacks with fallback alternatives on their sites. Verdana and Arial might not be very exciting fonts but I think they still play a role on sites that needs to be easy to read. I quite often use Arial as the paragraph font.
I think a list of default non-Google fonts like these should be available, but maybe that’s only me…
You will probably need some clarification from @Norm of why it is set up this way and if there is a better way I am sure he will be open to considering it. Some of those fonts you have listed may well require licenses for web use and cannot be automatically included.
It’s worth remembering that Blocs web fonts allow for woff, woff2, ttf, svg and eot. My guess is that this covers 99.99% of web browsers. I struggle to think of any browser in the last 10 years this wouldn’t cater for. If the browser can render any of these font formats your fonts will look as you intended.
This is really great news Blocs web fonts allows for woff, woff2, ttf, svg and eot.
Question how do you make these available in Blocs?
Any links or video tutorials would be cool.
If you use the free sky fonts app https://skyfonts.com you can now download a huge range of fonts from various sites direct to your computer with a single click. You can download any Google font here Download Google Fonts - Fonts.com | Fonts.com
You may need to covert some to web font formats, which can be done at a number of places like this https://onlinefontconverter.com
My little tip is to store web fonts neatly in Dropbox so they can be shared across computers. N.B Make sure that format versions have exactly the same name to work as expected in Blocs.
Help documentation here Font Manager – Blocs – User Documents
