Fwd: font features in CSS

Forwarding this from www-font, as this pertains to the thread on www-style and is an important point.

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Chris Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>
To: www-font@w3.org
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 11:16:30 PM GMT -06:00 Guadalajara / Mexico City / Monterrey
Subject: Re: font features in CSS

Bert Bos wrote:
...

> I thought at first about moving the font features from 
> the 'font-variant' property to a descriptor inside @font-face, but I 
> actually prefer now to not have them there either.

> This should be handled outside of CSS, with a program such as Fontforge 
> or maybe a format such as the proposed WOFF. That not only makes the 
> font features available in contexts where you don't have or want CSS, 
> such as XSL, SVG, PDF or TeX, but it also avoids complexity in CSS and 
> a dependency of CSS on a particular font format.

You expect web designers to use something like FontForge and to know how 
to re-write OTL tables? I think this is a little unrealistic - and would 
be more difficult than learning to some moderately complex CSS. Would 
commercial font licenses even permit altering fonts like this? This 
could also result in all kinds of odd variants of fonts in circulation.

- C

Received on Saturday, 31 October 2009 07:53:45 UTC