Typblography

Since the launch of Source Sans Pro just over two months ago, it has been encouraging to us to see its adoption in places such as the text font on the popular social news site, Digg, and incorporated as part of Stanford University’s identity guidelines for digital media. Part of the reason that we care about adoption is that we hope that as others want to use these fonts, they will also help to develop this type family to cover an expanding range of use cases.

Logos Bible Software 5 interface featuring Source Sans Pro

In fact, we recently had our first collaborative experience to extend the functionality of Source Sans. Not long after the fonts’ release, Logos Bible Software contacted us with a list of features which they indicated interest in helping to develop. Today Logos is launching the latest version of their bible study application and they have switched to using Source Sans as the main type for the user interface. In speaking about why Logos decided to make this change to their UI design, Bob Pritchet, CEO of Logos Bible Software, remarks, “Source Sans is a beautiful and uniquely useful type family with multiple weights, a rich set of glyphs, strong OpenType feature support, and most importantly, an open source license that allows us to extend it for specific needs, like scholarly text-critical apparatuses and ancient scripts.”
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I am pleased to announce that this year Adobe is one of the sponsors of the Indian Institute of Technology’s Typography Day at its Industrial Design Centre in Mumbai. In connection with this event, I will be presenting on the typesetting capabilities for Indian scripts in Adobe InDesign. This will only be the beginning of my journey….

In order to benefit individuals active in the field of typeface design, I will also be hosting a series of one-day type development workshops in several Indian cities. These workshops will be targeted at helping to foster local type designers and engineers within India and will thus be limited to persons residing in the region.

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Even though InDesign’s linguistic support is reasonably extensive, it covers only a few dozen of the world’s languages. Out of the box you’ll find support for most Western languages, from Bulgarian to Ukrainian, and if you happen to be using a Middle-Eastern (ME) version, you’ll also have support for Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew.

List of the languages supported out of the box by InDesign CS5.5

But what about other Arabic languages such as Urdu and Uyghur? Or Indian languages such as Hindi or Tamil? Or even other European languages such as Gaelic? Is it possible to enable those? The answer is yes, and there are two ways of doing it.
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Adobe has put a lot of effort into developing and supporting the OpenType font format, so we’re pleased that in the last ten years or so, type users have embraced it and enjoyed the layout features it offers. Getting accustomed to the typographic richness that OpenType provides means, though, that one misses it when it’s not available. That’s the problem we have right now with fonts on the web.

OpenType text layout requires an application or client to support a particular feature — substitutions like stylistic alternates and small caps, for example — before it can be seen or used. Most browsers don’t do this today. Your browser might receive a feature-laden OpenType font and use it to render the text you’re looking at, but it will ignore most or all of its OpenType features. (There is currently limited support for default ligatures, alternates and kerning in the current versions of Firefox and Safari, but it is far from the comprehensive support that web designers would like.)

Thankfully that’s about to change due to the growing popularity of web fonts and ongoing work on the next major revision for fonts in CSS, the “CSS Fonts Module Level 3,” usually just called “CSS3 Fonts.” (See the latest Editor’s Draft for all the details. Currently, OpenType layout is covered in the section Font Feature Properties.)

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