What you can get out of a high-quality font

In this case, an alternative to "-", U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is "−", U+2212 MINUS SIGN. On Linux, I considered mapping the keypad substract key to it, but instead I configured a xcompose alias.

  gold +1.2%
  oil  −6.4%
  corn +5.2%

  <td align="char" char=".">€ 1.20</td>

HTML 4 was still in this weird in-between time where there were styling attributes in HTML coexisting with the upcoming CSS. Afair no browser ever implemented character alignment and in Google’s HTML it is only written up as obsolete:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#dom-tab...

Styling in general is of course a CSS thing – but thinking about it arranging alignment in multiple interdependent elements is a problem which not just need a property but a layout algorithm which browsers then need to implement. So we still don’t have nice things.

> It occurs to me that contextual alternates could make this Just Work.

The replacement mechanism in OpenType fonts is surprisingly useful. I remember Apple’s San Francisco font switches between different variants of the colon if it follows text characters ("my proposal: nuke it from the orbit") or if it exists between numbers as in a time ("23:52"); in the latter it is more centered.

Generally, numbers were right-aligned in cells, so the % at the end was consistent (when present) and the plus/minus before the numbers didn't make a difference because of the alignment. But labels on the left like in some P&L or Cash Flow statement were always annoying

I've never thought about it, but that is somewhat annoying that the math symbols aren't a consistent width with each other.

A font of antiquated faſhion doth boaſt moſt excellent and ſubſtantious qualities, yet prithee, what of olde ſtyle figures doſt thou deem hath benefit that I, in mine own diſcretion, might chooſeth?

macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin character sets, to the fluent readers of those languages.

If anyone, then distro creators and maintainers will have to make that step. Google surely enjoys getting so much information due to hapless users loading Googlefonts on websites.

I am (clearly) clueless here, but isn't that what Noto's supposed to be?

From their update in february[1] this year it seems like it is basically complete but personal things got in the way and maybe they struggle to set up the systems for custom builds, ecommerce, etc. to ship it. People are constantly asking for the release, so I think it will eventually arrive, but good things often take longer than expected. :)

[1]: https://x.com/usgraphics/status/1762128387483824160

I am actually curious about this though, the Berkeley Mono font I found with a search does look quite nice. What's the deal with v2?

Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second depending on the device type.

We keep the total requests under 25, which cannot be done after multiple 3rd party fonts are added.

Additionally, some fonts can introduce CLS (content layout shift) after the font is loaded. Especially H tags because they shift a lot. CLS = your SEO is dead.

For speed purposes, especially mobile, using a 3rd party font is SEO suicide.

The sites we build for our clients are below 1.2 second mobile and 0.2 second desktop load time which gives these sites an enormous SEO advantage. These load times are complete loads, not initial draws or TTFBs. (results are provided by Google page speed insights - https://pagespeed.web.dev/) These load times change when we use the client's own fonts or the ones they pick from Google fonts. We have this discussion almost every time we onboard a new client.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091223045132/http://partners.a...