Use CSS to boost the font size of emoji with no extra markup


Group of emoji.

I want to make emoji bigger than the text that surrounds them. At my age and eyesight, it can be difficult to tell the difference between 😃, 😄, and 😊 when they are as small as the text. Is there a way to use CSS to increase the font size of specific characters without having […]

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Shakespeare Serif - an experimental font based on the First Folio


Collection of letters - each is vertically centred.

Disclaimer! Work In Progress! See source code. I recently read this wonderful blog post about using 17th Century Dutch fonts on the web. And, because I'm an idiot, I decided to try and build something similar using Shakespeare's first folio as a template. Now, before setting off on a journey, it is worth seeing if […]

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Fonts with threatening auras


Screenshot of text where all the characters lean to the left.

I was browsing the web recently when I can across this utter horror show of a font. Warning, not for the faint of heart. The thing is, I can't adequately describe why I - and many others - find it so disturbing. In all my years of reading English, I've never found a font which […]

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Should ₹ be part of the Latin font subset?


Stock photo of colourful Indian Rupee notes.

Some background reading. Skip if you're familiar with fonts. A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that. Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the […]

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WOTAN - the Font of Doctor Who and the War Machines


The War Machines title card.

As part of my silly floppy artwork, I wanted to find a retro computer font. Then I remembered that there's a 1960s Doctor Who serial with this beauty. The War Machines is a cracking slice of 60s sci-fi. It's very groovy. But what font is it? It isn't Westminster. The W is completely wrong. And […]

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Subsetting (Chinese) Fonts


There are loads of really delightful Simplified and Traditional Chinese True Type Fonts available on the web. There's only one issue - the file sizes are really large. In many cases, too large to effectively use as a web-font. For example, this calligraphy style font is 3.4MB. The beautiful Paper Cut Font weighs in at […]

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Chrome For Android Font Rendering Bug


The latest version of the Chrome Browser for Android has introduced a curious rendering bug. When scrolling, I notice that the font hinting seems to break down. This makes the text very "juddery". It looks like the fonts shrink and grow and they scroll. This is very disorienting when reading. In this example I've noticed […]

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