Re: [CSSWG] Minutes and Resolutions 2010-03-17

>From the telecon minutes:

> * bradk is unable to see much in TextEdit that shows additional
>   OpenType font features. Found ligatures in Arial, but the checkbox
>   doesn't have any effect of fi or ffi.

For Mac OS X users, you can play with OpenType/AAT font features in TextEdit:

1. Open TextEdit
2. Select Format > Fonts > Show Fonts
3. In the lower left there's a small gear-like dropdown, 'Typography' is
   listed there.
4. Select a font and the typography options available for that font will show up

Interesting options won't show up for standard websafe fonts like Arial,
you'll need to poke around for fonts with features enabled.  For example
'Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro' is a Japanese font with lots of features.

Windows users can experiment with OpenType features using XAMLPad [1], a
utility that uses WPF's support for OpenType [2].  The syntax is
somewhat clunky but you can use the sample included below as a starting
point.

Another option would be Prince 7.0 [3], Håkon's HTML-to-PDF converter
which supports arbitrary OpenType features.  If you're familiar
with LaTeX/TeX you can use Jonathan Kew's XeTeX [4].

The open source LCDF Typetools includes the 'otfinfo' command-line
utility [5].  If you run the command 'otfinfo -f' on a given font file
it will dump out a list of the features available for a given font.

Cheers,

John

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/archive/2008/08/25/xamlpadx-4-0.aspx
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745109.aspx
[3] http://www.princexml.com/
[4] http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex
[5] http://www.lcdf.org/type/

Example XAML doc:

<Page
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
   Background="Snow"
  >

<FlowDocumentReader ViewingMode="Scroll">
<FlowDocument ColumnWidth="1000.0">
<Paragraph FontFamily="Gabriola">
  <LineBreak/>
  <Run  Typography.StylisticSet5="True" Typography.ContextualSwashes="1" FontSize="100px">Apricot Kvetchings Quick Quiffenings Total</Run>
  <LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet1="True" FontSize="100px">1 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet2="True" FontSize="100px">2 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet3="True" FontSize="100px">3 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet4="True" FontSize="100px">4 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet5="True" FontSize="100px">5 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet6="True" FontSize="100px">6 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  <Run Typography.StylisticSet7="True" FontSize="100px">7 ABCDEFGHIJKLMONPQRSTUVWXYZ</Run><LineBreak/>
  </Paragraph>
</FlowDocument>
</FlowDocumentReader>
</Page>

Received on Monday, 22 March 2010 01:00:45 UTC