Re: [ft-devel] Lots of over-/undershoot in H&FJ "Mercury SSm A" at 17.6px

[Denis Jacquerye]

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm not sure... it displays fine on a Mac.

Maybe this very font is installed on your computer...

> I found something better, have a look at [...]

> http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/webfonts/mercuryssm-book. The
> example text at 18px demonstrates what I reported, other sizes look
> fine.

It only *accidentally* looks fine!  Attached is an image that shows
what the WOFF file of mercuryssm-book on this web page actually
contains (using the Unicode cmap).  The WOFF file is located in

  http://cloud.typography.com/759638/73452/css/fonts.css    ,

referenced in the HTML source of the web page.  As you can see, it
misses *many* glyphs, and at 18px the difference to your default serif
font is large enough that the hinting process delivers a different
x height.

I guess that those omissions are fully intentional so that you can't
simply grab the font without paying.  However, I believe it is an
error of www.typography.com that the glyph reportoire of the web font
isn't properly synchronized with the displayed text.

My conclusion: No problem with FreeType :-)

Two fonts are being loaded in the CSS: 'Mercury SSm A', 'Mercury SSm B', then fallback fonts are defined.

The two fonts each have missing characters, but put together they make a full set.

This occurs whether you select Mercury, Sentinel or Witney. One font has only EHINXdorsuwz12356890 etc., the other is missing those characters.

It’s possible the two different fonts are hinted differently.

--
Denis Moyogo Jacquerye