Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights

https://github.com/nathanford/type.js

by kingzain • 11 years ago

42 17 11 years ago

github.com

rrhyne4• 11 years ago

This going to be huge for designers. Lack of proper kerning in CSS makes web fonts feel like half of a solution.

lojack• 11 years ago

Honestly, I feel as though manual control over kerning will become an anti-pattern for most designers.

Most good OpenType fonts have kerning data built in, and its pretty simple to enable this feature for most modern browsers (Safari is lagging, see font-feature-settings). There certainly are times when you want to override the default kerning, but its few and far between, and certainly not a good idea for body copy.

I'd rather have improper kerning for old browsers, and nice kerning for new browsers than trust designers to properly manually adjust the kerning themselves.

rrhyne4• 11 years ago

trust designers to properly manually adjust the kerning themselves.

You've got it backwards. Never trust a font to provide your kerning, always adjust. Proper kerning is a fundamental tenant of good typography. Designers have always and will always manually adjust kerning.

TylerH• 11 years ago

It's not CSS' fault, it's the font's fault.

rrhyne4• 11 years ago

True, but fault != fix, which is why we used to spend hours kerning type in illustrator or photoshop.

RubyPinch• 11 years ago

I can't imagine how a font acts across browser/OS differences is predictable enough to sanely/safely make decisions about kerning

mjs• 11 years ago

Demo page:

https://cdn.rawgit.com/nathanford/type.js/master/index.html

memco• 11 years ago

Thanks for the link. Even this was a bit underwhelming to me. You have to click the (not very visible) link to toggle the effect on and off. Turning it on forces a reload of the page. Would be nice to have a side-by-side comparison of off and on.

tambourine_man• 11 years ago

How is the performance on large bodies of text?

drinchev• 11 years ago

Congrats on the work and more importantly about the idea!

Two things that I find ( in my opinion ) unpleasant :

1. Source code is hard to read ( some strange indentation and a lot of empty lines )

2. Support for dynamic content will do a lot of repaints.

kingzain• 11 years ago

I cleaned up the code a bit and created a PR. It isn't my project, however I thought it was interesting and warranted a discussion on HN. Thanks for the input.

saurik• 11 years ago

This should be using a -nathanford- vendor prefix for these library-specific CSS properties :/.

jamesdelaneyie• 11 years ago

Very cool :) Added some suggestions in the issues tab!

Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights

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