Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
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Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#2This going to be huge for designers. Lack of proper kerning in CSS makes web fonts feel like half of a solution.
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#3This going to be huge for designers. Lack of proper kerning in CSS makes web fonts feel like half of a solution.
Honestly, I feel as though manual control over kerning will become an anti-pattern for most designers.
Most good OpenType fonts have kerning data built in, and its pretty simple to enable this feature for most modern browsers (Safari is lagging, see font-feature-settings). There certainly are times when you want to override the default kerning, but its few and far between, and certainly not a good idea for body copy.
I'd rather have improper kerning for old browsers, and nice kerning for new browsers than trust designers to properly manually adjust the kerning themselves.
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#4This going to be huge for designers. Lack of proper kerning in CSS makes web fonts feel like half of a solution.
It's not CSS' fault, it's the font's fault.
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#5I can't imagine how a font acts across browser/OS differences is predictable enough to sanely/safely make decisions about kerning
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#6Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#7Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#8This going to be huge for designers. Lack of proper kerning in CSS makes web fonts feel like half of a solution.
Honestly, I feel as though manual control over kerning will become an anti-pattern for most designers. Most good OpenType fonts have kerning data built in, and its pretty simple to enable this feature for most modern browsers (Safari is lagging, see font-feature-settings). There certainly are times when you want to override the default kerning, but its few and far between, and certainly not a good idea for body copy.…
> trust designers to properly manually adjust the kerning themselves.
You've got it backwards. Never trust a font to provide your kerning, always adjust. Proper kerning is a fundamental tenant of good typography. Designers have always and will always manually adjust kerning.
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I feel as though manual control over kerning will become an anti-pattern for most designers. Most good OpenType fonts have kerning data built in, and its pretty simple to enable this feature for most modern browsers (Safari is lagging, see font-feature-settings). There certainly are times when you want to override the default kerning, but its few and far between, and certainly not a good idea for body copy.…
> trust designers to properly manually adjust the kerning themselves. You've got it backwards. Never trust a font to provide your kerning, always adjust. Proper kerning is a fundamental tenant of good typography. Designers have always and will always manually adjust kerning.
No no no, that's bullshit. A properly designed font isn't just the outlines, it's the outlines + spacing. Type designers spend almost as many hours perfecting the built in kerning as they do creating the outlines themselves, because the space is integral to the font as a whole.
Yes there are times, especially with display type, that you want to adjust the kerning between a few pairs of glyphs, but to say to "never trust a font to provide your kerning" suggests to me that you use a lot of poorly designed free fonts rather than professionally realized typefaces from reputable font foundries.
I would love it if the browsers would all support the built in kerning in a font by default, with a way to override it manually.
Re: Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights
#10Demo page: https://cdn.rawgit.com/nathanford/type.js/master/index.html
Thanks for the link. Even this was a bit underwhelming to me. You have to click the (not very visible) link to toggle the effect on and off. Turning it on forces a reload of the page. Would be nice to have a side-by-side comparison of off and on.