Hi Larry—

I was just throwing out a suggestion.

If you want to use a non-standard font on a website, the servers need to push the font to your system's browser before you can see anything.

It stands to reason that if you have three embedded (or @fontface) fonts you want to preload, this means three fetches from the server to your system to your browser.

That creates probably a noticeable time lag, a stall, a wait, and mostly you have a fraction of a second to interest your potential audience...and you lose because your fancy page loaded too slowly.

Forget the icons I posted for a moment. All I'm suggesting is that if you're going to create your own alpha-numeric font for the web, that you include common symbols you know in advance you'll use. So instead of having to preload an alpha-numeric and a symbol font, there's only one fetch.

I designed a typeface around Triplex Condensed for the Xara Xone, and within it, are these extended characters which are actually symbols. Do you see how these can be added to text without loading a special typeface? We've been using arrows on XX since January, while some we've not needed yet.

Click image for larger version.  Name: extended-charset.jpg  Views: 186  Size: 15.6 KB  ID: 88483


But if we get a reoccurring need for a symbol in the future, I'm going to pull this typeface off the server, add the glyph and then upload it again.