Roel Nieskens@letterror I had hoped for some more interaction here! I was wondering what kind of information about digital/web use these specimens have.
Kris Sowersby@pixelambacht @letterror Roel, is this partly why you made wakamaifondue? Frustration with the lack of foundry-provided font info?
@klim @letterror I come from a world where simply having heard about ligatures or kerning can earn you the title of font expert. Fonts turn into a black box as soon as they leave the foundry. Developers aren't even making assumptions about what the font can do, they just don't know. So anything that helps these folks learn that there are "settings" that might make the font work better in their context is useful. Examples, best practises, code. That's indeed why I made Wakamai Fondue.
Tim Ahrens@pixelambacht @klim @letterror This matches our experience: People just don’t use OT features.
Here is a curious case: they even designed their own custom font to fix the “shortcomings” of their previous font, JAF Bernina Sans: https://engineering.dynatrace.com/blog/in-the-flow-introducing-the-new-dynatrace-custom-typeface/
As if they were not even aware that there are less humanistic letter shapes via Stylistic Sets, Cap-Height figures via Lining Numerals, or Tabular Numerals. Don’t mean to be huffy (we already got paid anyway) but reading this it quite sobering.
@timahrens @klim @letterror That's a whole lot of effort they put in, just to not use Berina's features (O_o) Put my "developers put numbers in equal-width spans to get tabular figures" example to shame!
@pixelambacht @timahrens @letterror Yeah, I didn’t want to get into this, but it’s our experience too. OT features are rarely used. For example, did you know Gotham has alternate Q 3 a? Have you ever seen them used? I haven’t! Even if we do include alts, we get lots of requests to swap the alts into default slots to make them easier to use. Splitting up Metric and Calibre into separate families was one of the best decisions I made — they were originally planned to be kept together.
@pixelambacht @timahrens @letterror However, those that *do* like and use OT features really appreciate them, and we’re all type nerds so we tend to put them in.
@pixelambacht @timahrens @letterror I can’t remember who said it, but the killer feature of OpenType wasn’t the inclusion of features (alts, smallcaps, swashes, etc) it was actually the extensive language support. (Was that you @TiroTypeworks ?)
Tiro Typeworks@klim @pixelambacht @timahrens @letterror Perhaps not quite in those words, but I certainly think that the advanced typographic aspects of OpenType Layout are free-riders on the multilingual and complex script aspects. The layout engine + GSUB + GPOS model was primarily designed for complex script shaping, and we got things like ligatures, smallcaps, swashes, and other stylistic variants in Latin script as a byproduct.