Why a Better OpenType User Interface Matters | Hacker News Reader

Why a Better OpenType User Interface Matters

ilovetypography.com

35 pointslispython14 comments

I refuse to take seriously a typography site that looks that awful. Go take a look. Wince.

The white on red is actually painful.

To some degree I agree. The black text on white background look amazing on that site though, I wonder how they did that.

The black text on white background look amazing on that site though, I wonder how they did that.

Do you mean the main body text? Maybe these details will help if you like it:

The typeface appears to be Ideal Sans from Hoefler & Co, served via their Cloud.Typography webfont service.

I'm seeing hyphenation due to -moz-hyphen:auto in the CSS as well.

It doesn't look that good to me on this system, and personally I wouldn't go anywhere near Hoefler & Co without a small army of lawyers on retainer at this point, but whatever floats your boat I guess.

Thank you, you have been very helpful!

Totally agree. I opened a couple of links from HN in tabs, read a few, so when I actually opened this one I didn't remember what is that all about and actually couldn't read the title on the page. So when I managed to see through my bleeding eyes that it is something design-related I was simply… amazed.

I'm all for beautiful and better typography... but for a site that laments the lack of feature awareness, it sure didn't use the opportunity to teach me something. I don't know any more about those features than I did before reading it.

I wondered the same. Searching for OpenType and Stylistic Alternates I found the OpenType playground [1][2]. (I had to manually add a CSS @font-face rule to use a OpenType font.)

[1] http://people.mozilla.org/~jkew/feature-samples/opentype-fea... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/font-control-for-designers...

Butterick’s Practical Typography might be a good starting point http://practicaltypography.com/opentype-features.html

Ditto for Hoefler's explanation of Stylistic Sets, using Whitney as an example:

http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-sty...

As an aside I agree with the article, esp. the need for "a type interface that is consistent throughout [Adobe's] apps".

ilovetypography.com is targeted at those who know a bit more about typography than the general user. Not everything can be a tutorial starting from square one.

While I'm sure begging Adobe to add features to an application you're going to purchase from them no matter what sounds like it could work to these guys; I can't help but think they're not going to get anywhere.

Create demand for a system which offers you these features, rather than begging your ultimate supplier to add them to the supply for what appears to them to be no reason. If that system turns out not to be offered by Adobe, embrace it.

Adobe owns their product space, at least since they bought Macromedia 10 years ago. So, customers since have been angry about the lack of features--but its just a business outcome. Bitter, bitter, customers.

These aren't quite customers, I would guess. They're users. The bulk of Adobe's customers are the people who requisition the software, not the ones who use it.

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