FlowVellaFonts in FlowVella
Fonts in FlowVella
In launching FlowVella for Mac, it gave us a new opportunity to explain to our users what fonts we currently offer, why, and to open a dialogue to figure out how we can satisfy users whom often want fonts that we don’t yet support. Since FlowVella is now an iPad app, a Mac app and works with every web browser, there are a number of challenges with supporting fonts of all types and forms.
We support the following 18 fonts in FlowVella as of July 10, 2014:
Arial, Courier, Courier New, Deming, Georgia, Futura, Gill Sans, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Homestead, Lavandaria, League Gothic, Lobster, Museo, Ostrich Sans, Papyrus, Sullivan and Times New Roman
The following are the issues we have encountered with fonts along the way.
Licensing Costs of Fonts on the Web
If FlowVella was only a Mac app and iPad app, we could offer more fonts without incurring more (huge) licensing costs for each font. Because we allow all FlowVella presentations to be viewable via the web browser (Of course!), we have limited ourselves (and you) to free and commercial fonts with palatable licensing costs. This could change in the future and we will definitely consider adding new free and paid fonts. Please let us know either in comments or send us an email.
Fonts Discrepancies from Mac to iPad to Web
With the launch of the Mac app, we have had to increase support of fonts so they look the same (or almost the same) on all platforms. This is no easy task and font support in iOS (iPad and iPhone software) is not the same as Mac OSX. We, as users of FlowVella and other other applications, have the expectation that when we lay out text in the Mac or iPad app, it will look the same (or 99% similar) across devices and on the web. We are continuing to tweak and optimize and know that some web browsers are going to be more challenging than others.
There are challenges with kerning and leading of all these fonts when they are laid out and then viewed from one platform to another. FlowVella is meant to be simple, so we currently don’t allow any kerning or leading customization, but it’s possible we could add support for this at a later date.