

Type.js – remedying CSS’s typographic oversights - kingzain
https://github.com/nathanford/type.js

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

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mjs
Demo page:

[https://cdn.rawgit.com/nathanford/type.js/master/index.html](https://cdn.rawgit.com/nathanford/type.js/master/index.html)

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memco
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.

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drinchev
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.

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kingzain
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.

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

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lojack
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.

~~~
rrhyne
> 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.

~~~
dangayle
No no no, that's bullshit. A properly designed font isn't just the outlines,
it's the outlines + spacing. Type designers spend almost as many hours
perfecting the built in kerning as they do creating the outlines themselves,
because the space is integral to the font as a whole.

Yes there are times, especially with display type, that you want to adjust the
kerning between a few pairs of glyphs, but to say to "never trust a font to
provide your kerning" suggests to me that you use a lot of poorly designed
free fonts rather than professionally realized typefaces from reputable font
foundries.

I would love it if the browsers would all support the built in kerning in a
font by default, with a way to override it manually.

~~~
rrhyne
Even when you do have access to all the best fonts (most honest startup
designers don't) you still don't trust the font. You always kern.

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

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

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tambourine_man
How is the performance on large bodies of text?

