Typekit now fully supports Opera

Opera logoWe are happy to report that Typekit now has full support for serving fonts to the Opera browser. We’ve been dealing with small inconsistencies in how that browser handled our method of font serving, but it’s been resolved with changes on our side and the release of Opera 10.6. To upgrade your site, just sign into Typekit and republish your kit.

The change is especially poignant for us, since it was Opera’s CTO Håkon Lie who re-ignited web typography with his seminal article, “CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing” in A List Apart nearly three years ago. In it, he asked what many of us had been thinking for a decade, “But shouldn’t web designers have access to a wider selection of fonts and be able to use them without having to resort to creating background images?”

It’s been a lot of work to achieve that vision, and it still feels like we’re just getting started. Our Opera support, for example, doesn’t yet include the Linux version and we’re still working on adding screenshots to our specimen pages. But we’ll continue working on not only those features, but also our goal of getting beautiful typography onto every page on the web.

16 Responses

  1. Stephen says:

    The fat lady has sung.

  2. Eric P says:

    Thanks guys, great job! I’ve been waiting for this! Hopefully you get it working with linux builds as well.
    Can you elaborate a bit why it doesn’t ýet work on linux? As it sounds a bit strange.

  3. Andrei Gonzales says:

    Great news. I hope the Safari/Windows bug is resolved as well. That thing is still a pain.

    1. Tim Brown says:

      Yes, republishing your kit should resolve this. If it doesn’t, drop us a note at support@typekit.com and we’ll help out.

  4. I republished all 14 blogs today and it looks like the apostrophe is not translating in the Typekit for Opera update on the Mac platform.

    Go to http://BolesBlues.com and look at the “Celebrating Peter Case’s Wiggy Blues” headline to see what I mean.

    Then look at the Rihanna headline on the same page. The question mark translates. The exclamation mark does not.

    I don’t see those punctuation issues on Safari Mac or Chrome Mac.

    1. P.S.

      I see on all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs under Opera that the “back” and “forward” arrows for “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” is missing from the Typekit font kits.

    2. Tim Brown says:

      David, these characters are not only missing in Opera, they’re missing from the typeface Hill House. We’re considering a few different ways to address fonts with incomplete character sets. Meanwhile, please know that you’ve done nothing wrong. The glyphs just don’t exist. This is the case for BolesBlues.com, but I’m not sure about your other blogs. Send a note to support@typekit.com with their URLs and we’ll help out.

  5. Hi Tim —

    I’m just not sure why I’m seeing these “Missing Glyphs” appear in Safari Mac and Chrome Mac and Firefox 3.6 Mac — but not Opera for Mac. Is Opera not falling back to fill in the missing glyphs or something?

    It would be great if you could note somehow that certain font sets are not complete so we don’t use them on our blogs. Punctuation seems to be a pretty basic need in a font.

    1. Tim Brown says:

      Yes, like I said above, we’re considering ways to address fonts with incomplete character sets. See Dustin’s reply below about Opera and fallbacks. (Thanks, Dustin!)

  6. David,

    It looks like you’ve changed the font, but you might be running into a font stack bug in Opera that’s been reported for ages yet not addressed. Both the CSS 2 and CSS 3 specs state (although CSS3 states it in much better and easier to understand language) where if a glyph is missing in the first font in the stack the user agent should go to the next font in the stack and look for it there and so forth. Opera instead drops the entire rest of the stack and falls back to the default typeface which probably in your case would be Times, but in recent builds it’s gotten even worse. It just drops the font stack completely and renders nothing in its place.

    What you were probably getting was punctuation rendered in a different typeface and Opera was just not rendering anything due to a bug that should have been addressed years ago.

    1. Thanks for the detailed reply, Dustin. Love your website! Beautiful, funny and magnificently well-designed. A rare find!

      Yes, I changed the font on BolesBlues to something a little more “supported” by Opera — meaning substitutions will more gracefully fail, I hope. I now check punctuation and numbers when I do a font type test preview. Gak.

      I don’t know why anyone would use Opera if they won’t properly support fallback glyphs. Waste of a browser effort.

  7. Tim,

    Incidentally in Opera you’re still displaying a disclaimer at the top of the page after you log in saying that you don’t fully support the browser yet. Is this intentional?

    1. Jeffrey Veen says:

      Yes, that’s intentional, Dustin. While we’re now serving fonts for Opera, that browser still has some incompatibilities with the Typekit application itself. We’re looking into that.

  8. Bogdan says:

    That’s really some great news mates!

  9. Hi Tim –

    I’m just not sure why I’m seeing these “Missing Glyphs” appear in Safari Mac and Chrome Mac and Firefox 3.6 Mac — but not Opera for Mac. Is Opera not falling back to fill in the missing glyphs or something?

    It would be great if you could note somehow that certain font sets are not complete so we don’t use them on our blogs.

     Online İzle

  10. Martin says:

    Jeffrey: I’m currently surfing with the most up-to-date pre-release version of Opera from my.opera.com/desktopteam
    But I only see the fall-back fonts on http://typekit.com/libraries/trial
    Does your browser detection work correctly?

Comments are closed.