About
Snapfont was started by me - Shash - in late 2019.
Whenever I would visit Google fonts to choose a font, I would always try to visualize it on a live website.
But unfortunately the process was cumbersome. And while there were a few Chrome extensions to preview fonts on a live website, all of them had glaring issues.
So I build Snapfont to easily preview fonts on any live website. Not only does it provide a sleek interface to preview fonts, it will load the font in such a way that it will replace the correct weights of the font you just loaded with the ones of the website.
Come 2022 I wanted to push an update for Snapfont but I couldn't. I had lost my recent sourcecode for Snapfont.
So I'm rebuilding the extension from the ground up.
While Snapfont was built to quickly preview fonts, there were a ton of issues surrounding web fonts.
In no particular order:
- Opentype ligatures are great but there's very little information on how to use it. What if there was a tool where you could drop your font and it will give you all the ligatures plus a nice css preview and a css code ready to be pasted in your project?
- Variable fonts are here but they are cumbersome to use. You need to drop the font in wakamadi fondue or something similer to get all the axes information.
- Most font converter tools(like Transfonter) don't support Variable fonts. The tools that do support variable font conversion are almost all command line python scripts.
- Google fonts and most font foundries have subpar font preview pages. There needs to be more preset text to compare fonts against, choose background and foreground color, change line height, letter spacing, etc. Oh and if variable fonts are being displayed, be able to customize their axes.
While my focus is on font preview first and foremost, I'm excited to work on the new Snapfont and fix these issues in our industry.
Can't wait to see you try it!
- Shash
