Re: Problems with style-linked EOTs

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Laurence Penney<lorp@lorp.org> wrote:
> On 21 Jul 2009, at 20:58, John Daggett wrote:
>>
>> Nor does any shipping version of IE support
>> simple @font-face rule font descriptors such as font-weight or
>> font-style, so using bold and italic faces in IE is awkward.
>
> Could you elaborate on the problems IE has with bold and italic styles?
>
> In my tests with font-style and font-weight[1] I get odd results with
> style-linked EOTs. It would have been nice if one could arbitrarily assign
> any font to be the bold version of a given font (allowing Light and Medium
> weights to be deployed as a family without remastering fonts), but that
> seems not to work. Much worse, sometimes the space character seems to double
> in width in the bold and bold-italic. I've had states where this alternates
> between reloads of the page: good space, reload, bad space, reload, good
> space...
>
> If EOT on IE is typographically flaky with simple <b> and <i> markup, is
> there any point continuing with it?
>
> - L
>
> [1] for example at http://www.lorp.org/webfont/

>From what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong),
it's not "EOT in IE" that's flaky, but rather "@font-face in IE".  IE
just doesn't support @font-face fully, in that it doesn't properly pay
attention to the @font-face descriptors.

I can't tell for certain with the font you used, but perhaps you could
find a font that looks bad with simulated bolding in IE (or at least
significantly different from the 'true' bold face).  I seem to recall
from a previous project that Century Gothic doesn't look great in
Firefox's simulated bolding at some default heading sizes.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 15:52:50 UTC