Hi there,
I'm working on a webfont at the moment, and rather than simply hand the otf's over to a simple webfont generator, I want to take this seriously. What's the best way to go about creating smoothly functioning webfonts? So far I've found:
- Turn on in FL settings: "export oldstyle non-opentype kern table" and "expand class kerning while building [kern] table"
- Expand kerning(?)
- Keep opentype features. Apparantly there's support for that
- Include separate fontfiles for smallcaps and numerals(?)
Thanks in advance
Comments
@Rainer: I don't see the problem. Cut the font up in fontlab, then generate the ttf's, then convert to webfonts. Am I missing something?
In the OS X engine, kerning only shows if there is at least another feature in the GPOS table. Like Dave, I recommend it should not be 'kern' (lowercase letters, please). Try cpsp. Doesn’t hurt anyone.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but the GPOS table contains opentype features, right? So with, say, a 'liga' feature I should be fine, no?
I just googled cpsp, never heard of it, but it makes a lot of sense When I asked people before about how to space caps I was always told to either forget about it, or do a shitload of kerning between caps. Thanks for the tip!
[The whole notion of putting features into tables is a bit wrong-headed. What you put into the tables are lookups, and the lookups are associated with features. In theory a feature could include both GSUB and GPOS lookups.]
(I'm assuming that the reason kerning and ligatures don't cause this problem is that they more commonly reduce space usage rather than increase it. Yes?)
Now, the problem was quite egregious, so as a responsible web designer I had to fix it temporarily. This happened to Alright Sans out of the box — we could ask Webtype to never ship with positive kerning, we could ask them to ask designers to be careful with inline-block, or we push through with qualities we require from fonts and force Chrome to fix a sloppy issue that does not occur in other browsers. It seems obvious to me.
Yup, obvious to me too.