Launched and live: Custom language subsetting options
Since announcing last month that our new language subsetting options were in Early Access, we’ve continued work on the feature; thanks to all our early testers for your feedback! Today we’re officially launching the feature for all customers, so you’ll now see the additional subsetting controls in the Kit Editor by default.
If you’re new to language subsetting, we’ll walk you through using the feature here. You don’t have to change anything if you don’t want to — all of your kits will continue to work with the current settings — but many people use custom subsets to control the size of their kits while covering multiple languages. In short, a smaller kit means a faster load time for your website.
The new UI also gives you better visibility into the OpenType features that are included with a font. These are considered advanced typographic controls; on the desktop, you might have used the Glyph panel in InDesign to access some of these characters. On the web, they’re styled with CSS. We’ve put together a quick guide to CSS syntax for some of the most commonly-used OpenType features, and we’ll have more on this in the near future on Practice.
If you’ve already flipped the Early Access switch on, you can leave it as-is, but nothing about the UI you see will change. We’ll update again here the next time we release a new feature in Early Access.
In the meantime, enjoy the new subsetting controls! If you have any questions about using the feature, don’t hesitate to drop us an email at support@typekit.com.
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This is nice. Thanks.
I have noticed that when one goes with language options, some mathematical symbols go missing even if I play with all possibilities with languages. (for example, the minus sign). The font I am using are Arno-Pro and Garamond-Premier-Pro. Also, these fonts have the swsh feature and works on my site but in the kit, it says it is not available. No issues on this, but you may want to check this.
Hi Ramanan,
I did some digging for you and have some more information. We limit the OpenType features to those present in every face in the family. For both Garamond and Arno, only the Italic faces contain the ‘swsh’ feature. It certainly would be interesting to consider an enhancement to our UI where it indicated partial support, but at this time, we feel it’s safest to show only the features which are supported by the entire family.
I also did some digging on the symbols. Though it is true that we do not include the minus symbol U+2212, we do include U+002D, the hyphen-minus, which is what one gets when hitting the minus key on an US English keyboard. We’d like to get better information available to everyone about what is included and not included in our subsets. Hopefully we’ll have that available soon.
Thanks for the feedback, and if you find anything else, feel free to write into support@typekit.com
Gregor
Thanks Gregor.