Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

faux-pas, Detecting Faux Web Font Rendering

December 13, 2016

From deep in the archives (4 years late!), filed under “things I built but never posted on my web site”:

When a browser uses a web font but doesn’t have an italic or bold variation available, it will attempt to fake it! This is also known as font-synthesis. For some people (including me) this can be hard to detect visually.

faux-pas is a project to help detect this behavior so that you can fix it!

  • npm install fg-faux-pas and include the script in your build. Or use the Bookmarklet!
  • Demo (includes the Bookmarklet!) and Test Page
  • View on: GitHub or npm
  • Retweet

node-faux-pas is a project to run faux-pas on the command line:

  • npm install -g node-faux-pas
  • e.g. fauxpas https://www.zachleat.com/
  • View on GitHub or npm
  • Retweet

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, State of the Browser, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »