I recently discovered a free Google font called Open Sans that can be found here Browse Fonts - Google Fonts and after installing it on my computer I noticed it was available inside Freeway Pro as an html font, though I don’t remember it from before. Perhaps it was there already…
Presumably I could just select that inside Freeway but I’m guessing that it won’t show up in the user’s browser unless they also have this font installed. Google offers the possibility to add a line of CSS styling rather like this this but does that mean users would automatically see the Open Sans font even if it wasn’t installed on their computer?
I wonder how much this will slow down the load times having to contact Google every time. Does anybody what would be the best way to implement this font using Freeway?
The user will see the font even if they do not have it installed. As long as you add the line of Google code in the head of your FW page all will be fine.
I would suggest that you add the code to your master page even if you do not use the master page for layout purposes - this way you do not have to add it to every page manually.
Go to Page > HTML Markup > select the Before option and paste code into the markup box.
The next thing would be edit your CSS. I usually add a body tag with Open Sans as the font
Load time is negligible and not a real issue. You can optomize the Google code by only calling the the font weights that you use in your site. You will see in my markup I used only 300/400/700. We have used Open Sans on quite few recent projects including our own site - Brand and Web Agency - San Diego | SPUR
Thanks for explaining that so clearly Helveticus, I’ll try putting it into practice on the site I’m building now.
I actually discovered Open Sans by accident after updating the Wordpress theme on a blog I have and wondering what the font was. Then a bit of research showed it was Google Open Sans.
One thing I’ve heard is that the font displays somewhat differently depending on the operating system and I saw one designer saying that it renders rather badly in Windows XP, so he serves up Arial instead if the visitor is identified as using XP. Unbelievably it still seems to be quite common.
The use of Open Sans does look particularly good on your site shown in the link and the page was very fast loading.