- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 21:01:38 -0800
- To: Michael Day <mikeday@yeslogic.com>
- Cc: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, www-style <www-style@w3.org>
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Michael Day <mikeday@yeslogic.com> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > >> Because of this, my conclusion has always been that CSS was >> fundamentally broken as far as font selection is concerned. > > Isn't this an issue that can be solved by font authors and platform > developers? By font authors; no. By platform developers; not retroactively > If someone makes a new font called "Vulgaris Neue" with several weights and > in condensed and expanded versions they should have no problem keeping all > these faces within the same family if they so choose. Urm, tell that to Windows GDI. > On the other hand, if someone puts every face in a different family, it's > not clear why CSS should be responsible for doing the heavy lifting to try > and straighten everything out. Font developers MUST split up any family greater than four members (occupying the usual roles, regular, italic, bold, bold italic), at least as far as Windows GDI apps are concerned. Else their fonts won't work properly in most Windows applications. In OpenType and TrueType, there are a variety of name fields available, and font developers can express the "real" family grouping just fine alongside the GDI-friendly one. But that's not what gets shown to GDI apps, including browsers AFAIK. Mac OS doesn't have these restrictions, but as long as any major OS API does, there's an issue. Cheers, T -- "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Sir Winston Churchill
Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 05:02:15 UTC