CSS-Tricks

typography

Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?

# By Chris Coyier

Glenn Fleishman:

At an increasing number of publications, [curly quotes have] been ironed straight. This may stem from a lack of awareness on the part of website designers or from the difficulty in a content-management system (CMS) getting the curl direction correct every time. It may also be that curly quotes' time has come and gone.

I know it's highly uncool in this community to get quotes wrong and highly cool to remind people how to type them. I'm on the uncool side of the fence on this one. I go so far as to standardize on straight quotes on this site. I'm not worried about the encoding, but laziness is some part of it. It's a weird key command (⌥ [) especially for coders who are so used to straight quotes being required. Not to mention a different key command for the closing version (e.g. ⌥ ⇧ ]), and both are even harder on any non-macOS system). Straight quotes of both varieties have a dedicated key.

You know what is a cool-these-days sentiment? The fact that language evolves, including written language. I'm not anti-curly-quotes, I just don't care. If you'd like to write in straight quotes, but publish in curly quotes because "algorithmically, it’s a solved problem", be my guest. Perhaps written English, on the web, has evolved to "whatever, either way". Oooooo look at that period outside the straight quotes. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.

That Fluid Type Stuff Again

# By Chris Coyier

There have been a couple of articles lately regarding fluid type.

Matt Smith (calling it "flexible type"):

My preferred approach for more flexible type is to calculate the font size based on the viewport height and width using the :root selector

Richard Rutter (calling it "Responsive Display Text"):

In one fell swoop you can set the size of a display heading to be proportional to the screen or browser width, rather than choosing from a scale in a series of media queries.

Both are all about leveraging viewport units to size type that doesn't jump from size to size at breakpoints, but gracefully scales.

I'd highly recommend checking out Mike Riethmuller's Fluid type though, which is nearly just as simple but allows for setting minimum and maximum sizes, which feels like the way to go for me.

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Methods for Controlling Spacing in Web Typography

# By Geoff Graham

If you were developing sites in 2006, then you may have worked with a designer like me who was all up in your business about fonts not looking exactly the same in the browser as they did in mockups.

Then you may have tried explaining to me the pains of cross-browser compatibility and how different browsers render fonts differently from one another. In response, I likely would have sent you an image file that contains the content instead to make sure everything looked the same in all browsers. Yes, I was one of those designers.

Web fonts have come a very long way since then and we now have tools to tweak the way fonts render in browsers. Some have been around for quite a while. I remember my mind nearly bursting with excitement when I discovered FitText.js and Lettering.js way back when.

There are still plenty of situations today where adjusting fonts is needed to ensure the best legibility despite having all these fancy tools. We're going to cover a few of those in this post along with methods for how to deal with them.

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System Fonts in SVG

# By Chris Coyier

There was a time when the smart move in picking fonts for a website was to a font-family that was supported across as many platforms as possible. font-family: Tahoma; and whatnot. Or even better, a font stack that would fall back to as-similar-as possible stuff, like font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif;.

These days, an astonishing number of sites are using custom fonts. 60%!

No surprise, there is also a decent amount of pushback on custom fonts. They need to be downloaded, thus there are performance/bandwidth hits. There is loads of nuance on how you load them.

Also no surprise, there is some advocacy for the return to local fonts. Fast! Good enough! Let's look at that for a sec, then also look at using them within SVG.

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“OpenType Variations Fonts”

# By Robin Rendle

Over on the Typekit Blog, Tim Brown has written about an exciting development in the world of web fonts: an improvement to the OpenType font file specification.

This might not sound all that exciting at first, but “variable fonts” allows designers and developers to embed a single font file into a webpage and then interpolate the various widths and weights we need from a single file. That means smaller files, fewer requests, and more flexibility for designers. However, this format isn’t available to use in browsers yet. Instead, it shows that there’s a dedicated effort from Google, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe moving forward:

Imagine condensing or extending glyph widths ever so slightly, to accommodate narrow and wide viewports. Imagine raising your favorite font’s x-height just a touch at small sizes. Imagine sharpening or rounding your brand typeface in ways its type designer intended, for the purposes of art direction. Imagine shortening descenders imperceptibly so that headings can be set nice and tight without letters crashing into one another. Imagine this all happening live on the web, as a natural part of responsive design.

If you’re interested in learning more, we wrote about the call for a responsive font format which explains why it’s going to be so darn helpful in the future. John Hudson also wrote a long overview of the whole story, and the spec is here.

The Math of CSS locks

# By Chris Coyier

Florens Verschelde digs into the numbers behind the concept Tim Brown was talking about the other day.

When I tried wrapping my head around Tim’s implementation, and creating variants of it, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on exactly. I did a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations, and I thought it would be useful to share a mathematical explanation.

Here's my layman's explanation:

  1. You can make a value (like font-size) flexible with viewport units.
  2. Using just viewport units, that value might be too flexible, resulting in values that are too small or too big.
  3. You can "lock" the upper and lower limits with @media queries.
  4. You still need a fancy calculation to calculate the "middle" values between the two "locks".
  5. The calculations can vary in complexity, especially when trying to use relative units and accommodate user font scaling.

The code ends up, in one particular example, like this:

@media (min-width: 320px) and (max-width: 959px) {
  h1 {
    font-size: calc( 1.5rem + 16 * (100vw - 320px) / (960 - 320) );
    /* For a negative slope, we have to invert the breakpoints */
    line-height: calc( 120% + 3.2 * (100vw - 960px) / (320 - 960) );
  }
}

Remember there is a PostCSS plugin.

`font-display` for the Masses

# By Jeremy Wagner

Updated on January 12, 2017: Proper support checks are now part of the article body. Added information about the block value. Minor tweaks and copy edits. Enjoy!

If you're a regular reader here at CSS-Tricks, chances are good you know a bit about web fonts. You may even know a few useful tricks to control how fonts load, but have you used the CSS font-display property?

The font-display property in CSS is available in Chrome, and emerging in Firefox and Safari (but you might want to check browser support for yourself, since things change all the time). It's a simpler way of achieving what the Font Loading API is capable of, as well as third party scripts such as Bram Stein's Font Face Observer.

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Google Fonts Redesign

# By Geoff Graham

It's a big redesign of a site I'm sure all of use have visited many, many times. It even resides on a new subdomain: fonts.google.com.

Live typing samples in the search index for the win! There are also much nicer font specimen pages with clearer examples, cool/nerdy data visualizations, and pairing recommendations. Reminder that you may want to use a bit more sophisticated font loading than the snippets they provide, though.

Typography Handbook(s)

# By Chris Coyier

I ran across this Typography Handbook the other day and thought it was very well done. It gets you right away by looking at two resumes and having your rather instinctively prefer the one with nice type, even though the information on them is exactly the same.

Reminds me of how many other typographic "handbooks" there are:

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