Webfonts: How does Safari identify "suitable" Font Faces ?

Question

Will Safari refuse to load webfonts which provide less character coverage than the document character set specifies?

Have a strange issue, where on a page all webfonts are being loaded – except for one essentially providing ASCII coverage.

The font in question is "Monotype Old English Text" courtesy of Fonts.com.

Temporary URL:

https://cityapi.eu/Welcome-to-Urban-Hotbed.html

You can see it in the headlines of the skeumorphic newspaper containing press quotes/links.

Simply compare the Safari result to any other contemporary browser.

CSS
WebKit

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UrbanHotbed

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Answer 1

As I figured out, it’s much less the character set, than much more the specific webfont’s font-style.

If it does not exactly match the CSS font-style specified at the time of the font’s application to the webpage, Safari completely ignores the respective webfont face and goes down the line of font-family fallbacks provided – obviously until it finds one offering the desired font-style.

Other browsers instead fall back to the closest existing style of the specified webfont first, before considering alternative font-families.

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UrbanHotbed

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Answer 2

As I figured out, it’s much less the character set, than much more the specific webfont’s font-style.

If it does not exactly match the CSS font-style specified at the time of the font’s application to the webpage, Safari completely ignores the respective webfont face and goes down the line of font-family fallbacks provided – obviously until it finds one offering the desired font-style.

Other browsers instead fall back to the closest existing style of the specified webfont first, before considering alternative font-families.

Posted by

UrbanHotbed

Add a Comment

Webfonts: How does Safari identify "suitable" Font Faces ?

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