Typophile

Webfonts (esp Freight Sans) and figure style

I'm sure this question must've been asked at some point, but I can't get the site search to work. Or maybe this is just a dumb question that no one else would dare ask ...

Is there a broadly supported way to specify figure style in a webfont via CSS? I'm specifically looking at Freight Sans at the moment and anticipating the client's irritation with text figures in price lines and other promotional uses. But a more global concern of mine is whether or not webfonts even address this need.

Opentype features in webfonts are in their infancy (heck, they’re in their puberty on desktop!). For consistent results, you will need a different font file, in the same way you need one for small caps.

What riccard0 said. So far, only IE 10 and Firefox 4+ support some OpenType features. You can read more about the possibilities of the future here:
http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2012/01/13/ie10-supports-opentype-features-...
The article has also a link to demo pages by Font Bureau, Monotype, and FontFont:
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/opentype/Default.html

I guess my next step is to check into availability of an alt font for Freight.
Thanks for the info guys.

Freight Sans Pro has both styles of figures. So, if you can obtain permission from the foundry, you could serve an optimised version of it where necessary.

That's what I'm thinking. Thanks, Reccardo.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL