- From: Michael Day <mikeday@yeslogic.com>
- Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:12:20 +1100
- To: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- CC: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, www-style <www-style@w3.org>
Hi Thomas, > 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. Given that Linux with Fontconfig does not have these restrictions either, it seems that the issue here is one of Windows-specific hackery necessary to compensate for its broken font support, until the platform itself can be improved in future versions. For example, if a page asks for "900 12px Arial", then arguably the normal weight of "Arial Black" would be a better font face to provide than the bold weight of "Arial". But what kind of naming conventions would be necessary to make this work, given the lack of API cooperation? Could font authors and user-agent developers make an arrangement to work around the limitations? It doesn't seem like a good idea to complicate CSS to address an issue currently affecting one platform, and the @font-face solution is not very helpful if it means that the font properties will never be enough by themselves, and authors need to explicitly alias all the fonts they might want to use to ensure that they work as expected. Best regards, Michael -- Print XML with Prince! http://www.princexml.com
Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 05:13:14 UTC