New FontStruction home pages

This week we updated the FontStruction homepages.

Aside from aligning these pages with the look and feel of the other, newer pages on the site, there are a number of improvements:

• These pages are all about showing off the quality of your work, so the sample at the top of the page is much larger and has more room to breathe than before.
• We’ve replaced our old flash widget with an “HTML5” one. This means that the widget will work on more devices, now and in the future. It represents a significant step towards getting rid of flash completely from the site. For me, this is a promising prelude to replacing the FontStructor editor itself with an HTML5 version. You can also now access a few more predefined samples from the widget menu: French, German and Latin (“Lorem Ipsum …”).
• Rating and tagging should be more comfortable and work in the same way as they do elsewhere on the site. Editing the name or description for your FontStructions should also now be easier – just click on what you want to edit, and start typing.
• You can also now upload larger samples (up to 700 pixel wide) to better show samples of your work, and we’ve added a WYSIWYG editor for comments – so no need to fumble around with HTML tags anymore.

Whoops!

This week’s update came with its fair share of bugs and initially made FontStruct.com very slow.  We hope that most of the biggest bugs have been fixed, and we’ve spent the week optimising our code so everything should be running smoothly now. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the bugs. Keep those bug reports coming.

Advanced options

There are a couple of  “advanced” options hidden away behind the cog on the right underneath the widget. If you’re being annoyed by spam or annoying comments on an old FontStruction, you can now close comments for that page. I don’t really want to encourage people to do this, as we like to encourage debate and discussion, but occasionally it may be useful.

You can also now turn off a hidden, default setting which optimizes downloaded fonts for use as pixel fonts in Flash. This setting is a relic from a bygone era. It’s still the default setting when you create a new FontStruction, but we will be changing that soon. I’m pretty sure there are very, very few people who still need this optimization, and turning it off may improve the quality of the downloaded font, in particular the “vertical metrics”  (line height).

Happy FontStructing!