Language Features in Browsers

Thierry Blancpain

I can’t find any good information about this – what’s the situation with browser support regarding various language-related OTF features in browsers? This seems especially important for Cyrillic, but obviously also other languages and scripts.

Thomas Phinney

I must be missing something here. Why is it "especially important for Cyrillic"?

This would be a pretty complex matrix of browser versions vs languages, I think. That's just imagining a fairly binary model of supported vs not. The good news is that recent browsers support a lot of "complex script" writing systems.

Dave Crossland

Cyrillic using OTL for Bulgarian variants?

Nick Shinn

In those fonts for which I have provided Bulgarian variants, they are manually activated by Stylistic Set, rather than being automatically tagged by language. This is because, as I understood the situation, through a Typophile discussion, many Bulgarian users would consider “Russian” Cyrillic to be default.

However, Serbian variants should change automatically.

Thierry Blancpain

Sorry Thomas, I completely missed your reply. I guess it’s not more important for Cyrillic than other scripts in general.

But let’s say the Romanian 'S comma' – we have the feature in the font, and it’s of course supported by InDesign depending on the language set for a text field, but is it possible to use those features in browsers, and how? Aside from making it a Stylistic Set, as Nick says.

Possibly that is all already handled, I haven’t really tested it, so sorry if I’m asking a very obvious question here. I was just wondering and figured someone would know this anyway.

John Hudson

This is covered in the CSS 3 fonts draft, but I'm not sure of the current status of implementation in browsers. The basic model would be that a browser, either independently or via system APIs, would apply language system layout automatically based on declared language in the document, in much the same way as InDesign does when text is language tagged. However, CSS 3 also provides for author-override of this an application of explicit OTL language system tagging in. This could be useful if, for example, you were serving a web font that included a Serbian (SRB) language system tag that you wanted to be applied to Macedonian tagged text in the document.

kupfers

Did you make the glyphs a locl localized form? Then it should work in browsers that support OT features (new ones, not Safari), on by default. It’s tricky though as language of a text not always corresponds with language of OS or what the reader prefers to see.

Thierry Blancpain

Yes, we’re using locl. Great to hear Indra.