Ascender formally announces the FontsLive web fonts service

Today Ascender issued a news release announcing FontsLive.com - a new service featuring the finest quality web fonts. Special thanks to the web development DevBridge for their work on crafting this new website. We used the Ascender Web Fonts Platform to build this new site with the goal offering web designers and developers a broad selection of fonts with unsurpassed quality, and the tools needed to quickly test and implement web fonts on a website. We hope you enjoy our new site!

Read the Ascender news release.

TrueType hinting - the key to superior quality

Ascender has established a well-earned reputation as the leading developer of high quality TrueType fonts for on-screen reading. Whether for User Interfaces or Web Fonts, the challenges remain the same to optimize the user experience with fonts that are legible and readable.

Ascender's font experts are leaders in a process called 'hinting' TrueType fonts for on-screen display. Led by Tom Rickner, the Ascender team has developed a wide range of fonts that can be found in mobile phones, digital TVs and set top boxes, operating systems and devices of all kinds.

Ascender uses many of the same tools as other foundries to produce the basic font outlines. But that's where the similarity ends. Ascender's unique expertise and proprietary tools allow it to generating high quality TrueType fonts that are superior to basic autohinted fonts.

This process allows the Ascender team to hand edit the code and generate superior hints, and thus optimize the output for various rendering engines. All of this allows Ascender to produce TrueType fonts unsurpassed in font quality.

All fonts on the FontsLive website are reviews for their display quality. Fonts are divided into two basic categories based on the sizes they render well at: Text and Headlines. This is intended to help web designers select fonts that they are confident will look good across browsers and operating systems at their intended font size.

The Type Tester

If you haven't had a chance to check it out, you need to try our Type Tester. You can use the Type Tester to preview how a font would look on your website by adjusting its size, line spacing, letter spacing, color and background. Access the Type Tester by selecting a font and clicking Type Tester in the left sidebar.

Web Fonts for Mother's Day

What fonts speak to the personality of Mother's Day? A classy, distinctive font? Or a feminine handwriting font? You can browse the font catalog at FontsLive.com to find just what you are looking for. And to all the Moms out there - happy Mother's Day!