Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

Quick Facts

Featured Story

after Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers

What

Video and article showing advanced typography features coming to CSS

Who

Jonathan Kew, John Daggett

Excerpt

Using @font-face allows web designers a wide palette of font choices and with commercial font vendors supporting the WOFF font format, the set of font choices should improve even more. So the next step is clearly to try and make better use of features available in these fonts.

For many years, “smart” font formats such as OpenType and AAT have provided font designers ways of including a rich set of variations in their fonts, from ligatures and swashes to small caps and tabular figures. The OpenType specification describes these features, identifying each with a unique feature tag. But these have typically only been available to those using professional publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign. Firefox currently renders using font defaults; it would be much more interesting to provide web authors with a way of controlling these font features via CSS.

Håkon Wium Lie of Opera, based on discussions with Tal Leming and Adam Twardoch, proposed extending the CSS ‘font-variant’ property to include values for font features. Mozilla is actively working on a new proposal along these lines. This is a fairly big addition to CSS, so it will most likely involve some complex discussions about how best to support these features.

Comment

I’m so glad someone is working on this. The type community has embraced ligatures as far back as printing began. But the Microsoft powered browser team would never be able to appreciate or in some cases, even understand these features, and they certainly wouldn’t be the first to implement them.

When I worked there, there were people who appreciated type to some extent. The people who design all those fonts Microsoft keeps unleashing onto the world. Like everyone at Microsoft, though, can they really appreciate type very much to work in such a non-creative environment?

There still isn’t broad OS level support for ligatures, and Word has some very limited Office only implementation. That’s the funny thing about Microsoft, I keep expecting someone to say, “We have the most used word processor in the world and we don’t support this obvious feature.” But they never do. I worked on WPF, and that has support for a bunch of typography features, (tested using Zapfino) but I would highly recommend against using that. Microsoft won’t even use it.