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A comment on Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers. Parent comment

Re:Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers by gherkin0 on Sunday October 04, 2015 @03:20AM (#10326778)
Me too. I blocked web fonts in Firefox because a lot of them rendered text like trash when I had font anti-aliasing/sub-pixel rendering disabled (I prefer blocky-crispness to blurry-smoothness). Those stupid icon fonts have been the collateral damage.

And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?

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Re:Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers by antod on Sunday October 04, 2015 @03:48AM (#10326828)
> And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?

Some reasons:

* They are scalable vector images without the download bloat and processing load of rendering them with SVG.

* Raster icons need to closely match the screen DPI or they look awful - eg Retina displays made raster icons look like blocky pixellated afterthoughts.

* They inherit colors, sizes etc from CSS the same way as their surrounding elements.

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