EB Garamond: Apples and oranges comparison

[larsschwarz]

http://brick.im/preview/brick.html

The Google <> Brick comparison doesn't make any sense.

Google serves woff2 compressed version (14,7 kb), bricks uses regular woff (217 kb) so the brick file is nearly 15 times larger than the Google version.

More importantly Brick's woff was exported from a later version of EB Garamond: version 000.015, Google still uses 000.012 (4 years older!) and the Brick version is based on the OTF (CFF) source, not the TrueType version.

The comparison should at least use the same version of the fonts! You can't compare two fonts like that and pretend the Brick version looks better!

[alfredxing]

@larsschwarz Brick converts the OTF fonts provided by the font designer (Georg Duffner in this case), and converts them without modification to WOFF. The resulting filesize reflects that; the font is inherently large with a large character set.

As with the versions, I strongly disagree. It is up to Google what version they use. The fact that they have not updated their fonts to the latest version is their disadvantage. If it does indeed look better, it's because the font designer has put in many hours of work to improve the font. I would encourage Google to take full advantage of these improvements by keeping their fonts up-to-date.

Anyhow, with the preview I wanted not to compare the font design, but the rendering features (for example, the hinting, kerning, and ligatures). It seems that recently Google Fonts has improved drastically in these respects (and I applaud them for doing so!), which is why the two may not be as drastically different rendering-wise as a year ago when Brick first launched.

Thanks for opening up the issue. I really appreciate any discussion or contributions relating to the project!

[waldbach]

I appreciate the service a lot and have one website about literature using it now. What if Google gets so close to the quality of Brick that you decide to stop the service? Or is Brick here to stay for the coming years?

[alfredxing]

@waldbach I'm writing a post about just that right now.

[waldbach]

Ha, great! Thanks for the quick response.

[alfredxing]

@waldbach Sorry for the wait, I'm still working on some stats for the update, but Fastly's dashboard is down so I'm waiting for that.

[alfredxing]

@waldbach Posted in #106!

[waldbach]

Cheers!

[larsschwarz]

Side note: Brick also doesn't use the latest version (which is 0.016, published 9 months ago).

Georg designed EB Garamond with optical sizes in mind, so EBGaramond12-Regular is optimized for smaller body/text sizes. The comparison uses 24px to display it, where Georg uses 21px on his site.
If the designer uses the TT flavored over the PS flavor is probably because he prefers the final hinting/rendering that way (or he want's to support older IE versions) so the which-looks-better decision should be up to the designer, not the reader.

I do understand and like the idea of Brick, but to generalize »look good« (or even look better) just because you save the PS flavor with FontForge doesn't work IMHO. It would be precise to explain those differences in readme.md (PS flavor instead of TT and newer versions used on Brick) instead of just saying it looks better.

[alfredxing]

@larsschwarz After looking a bit more closely at the preview pages I did notice that Google Fonts serves EBGaramond-08 while with Brick I chose EBGaramond-12. I apologize for this difference, but would again like to have focused attention on the rendering/features differences (which are almost nonexistent now) rather than comparison of the font itself.

Brick does not generally save with PS, but we used to use it (before DirectWrite) if available because of the Windows rendering issues with TTF.

The reason I started Brick was not because I wanted to trick people into thinking Brick fonts looked better. It was because there were major shortfalls with fonts served by Google Fonts (no kerning, ligatures by default), and I wanted the web to become aware of these features. Now, this reason is not so convincing since Google Fonts has improved (see #106).