When the survey initially came out I was randomly given Computer Modern. The day before, I had painstakingly converted Computer Modern it to a webfont for a friend's blog (http://www.krisjordan.com) and I was shocked to see it on nytimes.com.
I quickly went over to a different (Windows) machine to try it out because I couldn't believe my eyes. That one was given Georgia, so I mistakenly assumed that Errol Morris was such a type hipster that he included Computer Modern in his type stack if it was installed locally. It was pretty funny to see this today.
One thing I will say, is that the Computer Modern webfont they used is a disaster. It had tons of aliasing issues. I wonder how they sourced it since natively it isn't in a normal font format. (Knuth!) That certainly would skew the results.
So if you want to use cmr, cmi, and friends, on your web site, what's the best way to do it? I see that you seem to have put them in a few different formats in /fonts/ and even stuck a base64 version into the stylesheet itself. I'd be delighted to hear more about the pains you had to take and why!
I don't remember the exact settings I used, but it needed a decent amount of tweaking to end up looking acceptable.
The base64 encoding doesn't contribute to anything other than website performance. It saves an additional request in modern browsers. The other linked fonts are for IE/Older browsers.
I quickly went over to a different (Windows) machine to try it out because I couldn't believe my eyes. That one was given Georgia, so I mistakenly assumed that Errol Morris was such a type hipster that he included Computer Modern in his type stack if it was installed locally. It was pretty funny to see this today.
One thing I will say, is that the Computer Modern webfont they used is a disaster. It had tons of aliasing issues. I wonder how they sourced it since natively it isn't in a normal font format. (Knuth!) That certainly would skew the results.