Show HN: A Showcase of OpenType Features | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Showcase of OpenType Features

otf.show

22 pointsdvkndn7 comments

Absolutely beautiful website about an highly topical thing. The brave new world of Unicode and OpenType brings features to the remotest parts of the GUI.

The stunning thing about that is (as with many good design descisions): You only start missing them when they are not present. For instance, I have the beautiful Inter font installed on two computers and use it in LibreOffice on both of them. One computer has older software without ligatures support. The excel sheets look awful without proportional figures!

Thank you :D

As a matter of fact, I also discovered many notes regarding software support/compatible. I think at some time I will put it on for reference. It's may be a problem as we deliver things digitally more and more now. No more the safeness of a printed paper.

The historical forms and ligatures seem to just be wrong to me, at least for the one font which supports them. The long s should only be used when it is not the final letter in a word, similar to the two variants of sigma in Greek. Perhaps one is supposed to cleverly turn off the feature for an s in final position but then that surely means it cannot be included in ligatures.

I didn't know that rule. Thank you for telling me.

The font is EB Garamond. It's the only free font I found with historical alternates. At first sight I do think the font should be smart enough to apply those rules for me (contextual features I think, like in "frac"), but it seems, at least on CSS, one must do it themselves.

I'll fix this :D

Hm I'm not sure if it's the font EB Garamond's issue or it's OpenType's limitation.

Truth is, the font does have support for "ſs", and is listed under "Historical Ligatures (hlig)". However, it is only available when "Historical Forms" is turned off. When the latter is enabled, it becomes "ſſ" and I can't find "ſs" anymore (unless manually typing it out).

I think I can learn more by asking at the EB Garamond repo :D

If you happen to know a font that have historical forms support, please tell me. I can't find one beside EB Garamond (I also know Warnock but it's too expensive for me)

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Update: yes EB Garamond does warn this feature is not as clever as the rules on wikipedia. Maybe for now I would choose a safer text for demo while looking for a better font

I had a crash course on ligatures and stylistic alternates when I stumbled across a handwritten font[0]. It has slightly different glyphs for any second repeated letter or number, but the initial capital glyphs has these massive strokes that I think need to be calmed down if used more than twice in a headline.

[0] https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/reey

Thank you! That's a nice feature. I've just added it: https://otf.show/rand

Turn out it's called "rand" in the spec, but not many applications support that (including browser) so they implemented it via "calt"

#todayilearn

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