So in a previous post, I put it on paper (or screen) my usual complaints about Chicago pizza, about how substandard it is even with the lower-than-NYC standard of Albany, how the sauce is way too sweet, and the crust too cardboard-esque.

Today – praise the lord – I might have found a place I can bring my New York friends to without being embarrassed. Gigio’s Pizzeria is the most unassuming storefront you have ever seen, with the best pizza I have had during the 2.5 years in Chicago. The store looks so shabby, in fact, that despite living in the neighborhood for almost a year now, I had never ventured to walk in. After a few Google searches for “NY style pizza in Chicago” pointed me there I finally decided to stop by and boy, was I shooting myself in the foot for not doing so earlier.

The dough still isn’t quite right – maybe the secret really IS “in the water.” But it was thin, foldable, chewy, and honestly, the least like cardboard of all Chicago pizza joints’. The cheese and toppings (I got pepperoni) were up to par with NYC, down to the dripping grease detail. Overall, not perfect, but at least comparable. So I stand corrected – it is indeed possible to get a decent slice of the pie in Chicago, and I know where I’m getting all my pizza from now on.

Last week I was contacted through this site to do a tutorial on how to use CSS @font-face for Korean fonts. I’ve been so busy working for a bunch of agencies and a giant freelance project on top of that that it took me this long to do it – I hope it’s not too late. Anyway, I first started using @font-face after reading an article on Six Revisions, one of the more engaging web design blogs out there. The article does a great job showing you how @font-face works with English characters, so I would read that first.

Honestly, the web-safe fonts for Korean totally suck. Gulim is too round for my taste, Dotum too pixelated, and Gungsuh… who wants to use that font for anything, really. The trick to use @font-face in Korean (or any other non-English characters) is to know your unicode range. Speaking Korean and Japanese (with some Chinese), I’ve had to work with unicode pretty extensively in my projects, working with PHP encode/decode methods, etc.. But I had to ask the guys at FontSquirrel to figure it out properly for Korean. For this quick tutorial, I’m going to use FontSquirrel @font-face generator to get the appropriate fonts displaying in Korean.

1. Pick your font.

Needless to say, you have to pick a font that’s compatible with the language of your choice. I’ve had hits and misses with this: some fonts decide to bail on you on browsers, but 99% of fonts that display fine on your local machine have worked for me. Newer browsers like Chrome tends to break some characters, but I’m hoping that improves over time. Here I’m going to work with Daum. Daum is a free font authored and distributed by daum.net, one of the biggest portals in Korea. It’s very clean yet carries enough umph to draw attention, which is rare to find in a Korean font, not to mention it’s one of the very very few that are free.

2. Figure out your Unicode range.

The unicode universe is well documented, and all you need to do is look.
UNICODE CHARTS
On the right side is our beloved Korean language under “Hangul (which is our writing system).” Unlike Japanese or Chinese writing systems, Koreans write by combining alphabets into characters, each of which represents a syllable. It’s so scientific, and I’m proud of it every time I learn a new language and realize how much sense our system makes. The “Jamo,” at 1100-11FF, are the 24 alphabets and their combinations. You could probably leave this out of the range, but that means you’re going to get broken characters if any syllable is incomplete. I like to leave them in just in case. The real range you want is in the “Hangul Syllables,” at AC00-D7AF.

3. FontSquirrel Generator Adventure

The FontSquirrel interface is pretty easy to work with as well. First, upload your font:

To enable unicode characters, you must go into the Expert mode:

Then, under Subsetting, click Custom Subsetting.

This brings up a bunch of rows of options, and we are really only concerned with the Unicode Range setting. A word of caution though: FontSquirrel uses AJAX to let you preview the unicode ranges, and since the Hangul Syllables range is so large, it may freeze your browser while it loads. If you click in the input field and start typing “1100-11FF, AC00-D7AF” you will almost certainly freeze your browser for a few minutes with each letter you type. I would recommend copying it onto your clipboard like that, and pasting it. This will freeze the browser for…5 minutes max, then it will display:

Voila!

4. Download & Implement CSS

If all went well, you should be able to download the generated webfont package by clicking a button at the bottom. The ZIP archive will contain the TTF, EOT, WOFF and SVG fonts (for all sorts of compatibility) and automatically generated CSS (how kind of them) so you just have to stick it into your CSS file! The result is beautiful, simple, SEO friendly and clean renderings without involving sIFR or FLIR:

I’ve only tried this with Korean, but I’d expect this to work the same way with any language. Hope this helps.

I recently started working for a few other web agencies, which means I’m getting more work but I don’t get to credit myself for any of it. Here is a freelance project I just finished – the client already had all the graphic elements ready, so I did not interfere in any way with the design save for the navigation, which is done in CSS(3) and jQuery (just for nice fade-ins. Looks completely harmless with JS disabled). Everything’s pretty straightforward HTML/CSS so…there’s that. I’m kind of bummed out I don’t get to upload all the other stuff I’ve been working on, but there are benefits to freelancing only half the time