I’m sorry this has been frustrating. When we first set up the default character set, our goal was to make it as small and optimized as possible. At the time, ligatures were not widely supported, so excluding them from the default character set made the most sense.

Since then, ligatures have become more widely supported; we share your desire to make them available without requiring the full character set, which most of our users don’t need. (And I personally want to see them available with Chaparral, as it’s my my font of choice, too). I don’t have a date for then such a feature will be released, but rest assured it’s in the works.

Whoa, hold on a sec

Your kit is 429K – that’s pretty big and could slow your page down. You can make this smaller by removing some fonts, or unchecking some options in the Weights & Styles section.

Yes, guys, it is slowing my website. After more than three months you didn’t solve the issue, you’re still advertising this font and you’re writing posts about it too. Chaparral -is- one of my favorite fonts, that I’m forced to a 500kilobyte kit to use it is a pain I can deal with. But, I think, everyone should be at least informed that use it ain’t so cool. I will report Adobe about this, too.

I will stay as a Typekit customer, because I believe it is a very good and strong product, but seeing that you’re not doing anything to solve my issue is quite depressing.

Good typography to everyone,
DDS

I’d hazard a guess that I’ve used more Chaparral on http://storiesandnovels.com than on any other site. It works great on white, see: http://storiesandnovels.com/the-path-of-all-that-falls but I’m still uncertain when it’s light on dark (see homepage).

It also seems to combine well with Proxima Nova (what doesn’t?). I found the lovely combo at this site: http://www.101cookbooks.com/