Hey, Bruce -- Good to see you're still around, alive and kicking.

I'll let the web wonks give you more expert opinions and possible solutions. All I can say is that I suspect you'll be setting yourself up for a world of headache and frustration on your current course. Myself, I would surrender the Corbel and look elsewhere.

-- Kent.

 Actually, Corbel doesn't seem to have given the lining figures any PUA code points, so I'm not sure how you could display a lining `2' even on systems that had the font installed.

—Joel

What you really need is for the browsers and CSS to support lining vs oldstyle as formatting. Not there yet.

Cheers,

T

Hi Bruce!

What Thomas said.

A bit more detailed here:
The css3 fonts module is still a working draft […] so there remains the possibility to address the omission of figure case selection. […] the numerals cannot be ‘transformed’ to upper- or lower-case, in the style of text-transform. This implies that a ‘variant’ property should be used, much like font-variant is used to specify small caps. As such, it is proposed that a numeral-variant property be added to the css3 fonts module. — webtypography.net

However, you can use a workaround similar to the one described here: Using The Best Ampersand Available.

Just tag all instances of ‘MM2’ in your HTML with something like <span class="lf">MM2</span> (lf for lining figures here, you can pick any name). Then, in the CSS, specify a sequence of sans fonts that are similar to Corbel – but have lining figures, as default:
.lf {font-family: "Myriad Pro", "Myriad", Calibri, sans-serif;}

There certainly are more (possibly better) options. Still, Myriad is quite widespread, and users that have Corbel will most likely also have Calibri. Both do a great job.
For some other faces, you’d have to adjust the size (see Lucida Sans), otherwise they’d stand out. Unfortunately, and afaik, you can’t do that dependent on the font, yet.

This example is rendered by Safari on Mac OSX; font-size: 18px. I assume your text will actually be even smaller, so the differences would really be insignificant.

F

Thanks for that suggestion, Florian. This could be an effective workaround.

Am I correct in thinking that since Acrobat Reader uses Myriad as its default sans font, then almost every computer is going to have it installed?

Bruce

I’m afraid it’s not as easy as that. Fonts that come with Acrobat – and reside somewhere on the computer – still might be unavailable to the browser. If one can believe this study, Myriad is actually very rare: The most common fonts, codestyle.org
Maybe Joe Clark can elaborate on this topic? I reckon he knows quite a lot about the spread of fonts.

I’d go with Calibri and rely on the fact that those come bundled, if any.
Keep in mind most users won’t see neither Corbel nor Calibri.
In any case, make sure to add Corbel to the end of your font stack, as a fallback, so that your users don’t end up with some random default sans like Arial. That might look worse than having the old-style figures in the first place.

Well, this is exactly what is so disheartening for me when I approach web issues. I am a book designer, so I want to control everything, and of course I can't!

My hope was that Corbel could pop up first, on the newer Windows machines that happened to have it, but would rely on Verdana and Trebuchet as next choices for everyone else, and certainly ahead of Helvetica and Arial. Yet I see now that not everyone has even these fonts.

Thank you for the link to the codestyle study. Useful and interesting. When I went to their site, I noted that Gill is not displayed correctly (in Gill) in the list of font names, and when I asked for samples of Calibri and Corbel they both displayed in Times. Oh well, I'm sure the hard data in percentages is correct.

I look with envy at Sumner's site (http://www.stonetypefoundry.com/) and how gorgeously he sets up everything, controls everything! Every line break! Every subtlety of linespacing! Every alignment with illustrations! And of course he's doing that through PDFs, over which he does have complete control. But my collaborator and friend, who'll be writing code for this new site, keeps telling me to have as few "pictures of words" as possible, since it runs directly counter to the idea of searches, appearances in rankings, and so forth.

What a strange tug of war this is, between the modern practices of searchability and any-browser-displayable type on the one hand, and my hot-metal, lock-it-all-up-in-the-chase and control every hairspace desires on the other . . . Am I a curmudgeon who can't change? Or am I a person who justifiably wishes to see information displayed in a particular and refined way, on every computer?

I'm sure many of you have these conversations with yourselves on a regular basis. And in the end, I guess I should put up, shut up, and just keep on using Verdana.

Bruce: Actually, Sumner is using GIFs, not PDF.

Florian beat to me the CSS answer. :)

All the PCs I've encountered (beside my own) lack Myriad.... It's probably best to throw in one more generic option (helvetica?) before the "sans-serif" option, since the default sans is often asstastic.

---
eeblet.com

I realize this is an old thread, but I have to say that the lack of control designers have over display on the web is a feature, not a bug.

"displayed in a particular and refined way, on every computer?"

Considering that screens and eyesight (if your user even has eyesight) vary a lot, this is impossible and not a good thing.

Why would it be ‘not a good thing’ if the author could suggest a figure style that goes best with the content?

Three years later, there is hope for more typographic control: W3C’s CSS Fonts Module Level 3 Working Draft includes a section about numerical formatting: the font-variant-numeric property.

John Daggett (Mozilla) explains the OpenType font feature support in Firefox 4. In this browser, you can select lining figures via the vendor-specific CSS declaration -moz-font-feature-settings: "lnum=1";.

See also Christopher Slye’s article on Typblography, OpenType Features Come to the Web.