Archived topic
Font variants needed
5 replies · Started by Raul on May 8, 2022
Hello,
I want to be sure if I understand correctly what font variants do I need, for website speed reasons.
I have read your articles and a lot in the forum, but I still have some doubts. I will upload the font (Roboto) on the server and I'll use the CSS as indicated in article/s.
First, of course, I will use regular, bold and italics in my website texts.
My questions are:
1. Do I need to download and use the font variant italics if I want to use italics? I have made a test without using italics in the Font Manager and I could use italics in GenerateBlocks.
2. What is the difference between "bold" and font-weight 700? I don't see any difference, so I am thinking that instead of using one more font variant (700), to simply use "bold". What's the reason to use 700?
3. If in the same paragraph, I use regular, bold and italics, there'll be 3 different variants? (I guess not...)
Thank you!
Hi there,
to cover:
There are font variants eg. 300, 500, 700, italic, bold that come as part of a font family that you can choose to load..
And there are browser CSS styles including italic and bold.
If you only loaded Robot and no variants then italic and bold will be the ones the browser generates. If you like what you see then do not bother loading the variants.
So to answer your questions:
1. No - if you are happy with how the browser displays it.
2. bold will load the 700 variant if available or it will let the browser fake it.
3. If all variants are loaded then yes it would require 3 variants or 1 x variant and 2 x browsers if you choose not to load variants.
I hope a kinda made sense
Thank you very much. Yes, I think understand what you say, but I was definitely not guessing that.
So, I see two options:
1) if I want to make sure that all users have the same experience, I should also use, at least, italics and 700 for bold, or
2) if I am concerned more about load speed, I can go with regular alone and hope that users won't have weird UI experience.
In my case, beginning of a website, I'd choose the second option as I want web speed performance while not having many $$$ for hosting.
That is correct.
Option 2 is the route i would choose. For Roboto style fonts the browser can do a very good italic and bold versions.
Thank you a lot. I appreciate your answers very much!
You're welcome
