Typekit Blog

I'm actually a bit conflicted about support for DRM schemes in HTML5.

I absolute loathe DRM and I wish every damn publisher of every damn type would come to their senses and actually sell DRM-free digital products.

However, there is one case where some form of "DRM" does make sense, and that's actual renting - or more specifically, the popular case of "catalog subscription" (ala Spotify, Netflix and so on). You're clearly renting access to a catalog of goods in this kind of model, and therefore it makes sense that you'd want to stop people from permanently acquiring copies in such a scenario, especially if you're selling actual DRM-free downloads at the same time (in my ideal digital store where it makes sense they would offer both of these side-by-side). The catalog subscription model has some clear value to it, and I'd hate for it to disappear due to "technical unfeasibility".

As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. I can't really think of a good solution to this, unless you got the big wigs at various publishing outlets to accept that to do HTML5 streaming, you can only make downloading the rentable versions inconvenient for regular versions (instead of being able to use a heavy-weight closed DRM plugin), but I'm afraid that could be quite challenging. It has worked for Adobe and webfonts, though[1], so maybe there's hope. Forcing HTML5 to be…

Just what my eyes told me when I looked at the page.

Looking now at the Typekit site (where the font comes from) I see that Adelle, indeed, is not recommended for body text by Typekit, only for headings.

The Typekit site offers some short explanations about what these recommendations mean:

Fonts recommended for paragraph text: “Recommended for continuous text at small sizes, these fonts possess a generous x-height and are manually hinted to perform well across operating systems.”

Fonts recommended for headings: “Recommended for short text at medium to large sizes, these fonts are generally more decorative and often served with PostScript outlines for improved rendering.”

A good place to start reading if you are interested in this is a post at the Typekit site again, part of a series on web fonts and font rendering:

http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/17/type-rendering-review-and-fonts-that-render-well/

It includes this:

“All of the fonts tagged Paragraph have been manually hinted to look great on screen at text sizes in every major browser/OS mix. Use these recommendations to make informed decisions about how well a font will render, knowing that they are backed up by Typekit’s font diagnostic tools.”

More generally:

I have found that often—I’m tempted to say more often than not, but I have not the data to back this up—designs using web fonts are worse than they would be without web fonts. When you consider how complex the issue of good rendering across devices and…

Adobe used to have this feature in their typeface format and type design tools in the 1990s. The format was called “Multiple Master”, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts and http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silver-anniversary-story-how-the-originals-endured-in-an-ever-changing-industry/. (Metafont also has this feature.)

In practice, type designers found that making such fonts took dramatically more work, and typographers/publishers weren’t willing to pay commensurately more money. So it didn’t see much adoption outside Adobe.

As a result, the format died out, and we stuck with descendants of the original PostScript font format.

More recently, many companies (but especially Adobe) ship “pro” typefaces with separate fonts for various “optical sizes”. Again, producing these takes a lot of extra work, so most type designers don’t bother with it, and because it is designed to work with standard tools (which don’t have special knowledge of the feature), typographers/designers must explicitly choose which optical size they want to use in each context. So in theory it’s inferior to the Multiple Master format, but in practice it is backwards compatible, which ends up being more important.

Apple can solve this problem for their UI fonts specifically, because they have full control. Unfortunately, they haven’t offered these features for use with other typefaces.

The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China) only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%BD%93) but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows.

The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for free:

- Microsoft YaHei in Windows http://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation#product_top

- Hiragino Sans GB in Mac (http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/06/04/updates-on-font-changes-in-snow-leopard/)

- Source Han Sans free from Adobe (http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/)

Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font. There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones).

And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).

Correct, Adobe finished the MM specification in 1991 and released the first fonts in 1992[0].

Apple in 1995 released QuickDraw GX, which included a new font architecture called TrueType GX, a complete reworking of font architecture. As well as including MM-style font variations, it also decoupled glyphs from characters, such that multiple characters could use the same glyph, or multiple glyphs could be available for the same character.[1] While GX was a market failure, many of these technologies resurfaced in OpenType, though variations specifically did not.

Microsoft acknowledge that OpenType Font Variations is directly based off Apple's work in QuickDraw GX font variations.

[0] http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silver-anniversary-story-how-the-originals-endured-in-an-ever-changing-industry/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickDraw_GX#Typography

I believe the Source family only recently got smallcaps, in 2017: https://blog.typekit.com/2017/01/10/introducing-source-serif-2-0/ So you need to upgrade.

The Gothic drop cap is nothing to do with Source, but it is from Deutsche Zierschrift, one of 5 drop cap fonts (Cheshire Initials, Deutsche Zierschrift, Goudy Initialen, Kanzlei Initialen, & Yinit).

In one of the clever performance tricks we use (https://www.gwern.net/About#design), we subset them all into multiple font files, one initial per file, which makes them almost free in terms of bandwidth. The CSS for positioning them is quite tricky, however, due to subtle brokenness in browsers (particularly Firefox), so you'll have to inspect the 'DROP CAPS' section of https://www.gwern.net/static/css/default.css carefully if you want to imitate it.