Comments on: @Font-Face In Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha Stinks, Despite “Snapshot” Hype

By: Richard Fink

Richard Fink — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:35:02 +0000

@davis
The Opera guys are working on the problem you describe which is synthesizing bold and italic and bold italic from the regular font. The other browsers do it – but as you mentioned regarding Safari, it is not standardized.
See this for the particulars:
Opera 10.5 Beta Comes Through
Also, it appears that Opera still has problems with the fallback font stack when @font-face is used.
See:
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/04/11/opera-hates-my-web-font/
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/04/13/opera-loves-my-web-font/

Regards,
Rich

By: Davis Peixoto

Davis Peixoto — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:34:35 +0000

Hi guys,

I recently get into @font-face through Nice Web Type article and I am enjoying it, even with IE boilerplates and Opera bugs (btw, thx Paul Irish, your article really rox).

Anyway, I was using Opera 10.50 on Windows XP machine, and my surprise was when I get to Opera problem/workaround page I saw both working fine.

After some search about when Opera fixed the problem, I arrived in this post and took a look into your test page (very nice, dude, very nice). I could see it seems not fixed. In FF 3.6 it renders well and in Safari 4.0.5 it looks kinda weird (synthesized italics looks more lean than the true italics).

But I went a little bit further and looked into the source-codes. And here is where I got tricked. In my understanding, Opera guys states they fixed one problem, and you seem to be testing another principle.

Let me explain. Before, if you declare the same family, importing two different files, let’s say one normal and one italic, assert the same font-family to them, and make the difference using the attribute font-style into the respective @font-face, it didn’t work. You need to declare different font-family names, in order to get Opera working to use the correct fonts and so forth. This is bad, I agree.

But now, with Opera 10.50 you can do that – you did that in your test page in the “true” lines. So, for me, the bug is fixed.

The problem, or the advantage Opera does not have in comparison to other browsers is: it does not dinamically render the fonts.

The wrong lines in your test set were declared with the control font. You just imported one regular font, and used them declaring bold or italic, expecting the browser to render those styles itself, without any reference (this explains why Safari rendered them different).

This is a band-width saver feature that Opera lacks, but not something I can consider a bug. More than that, letting the browser render styles based into a base-font does not seems fair enough, hence it can or cannot render it propely as expected when importing a proper file.

Well, that’s it pal. And thanks again for this page.

By: Richard Fink

Richard Fink — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:02:55 +0000

@David
Sorry to have released your post so late. It slipped by me.
All I can say is that I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Opera 10.5 renders what should be the “Regular” font as Bold Italic. IE, Chrome, FF, and Safari render it correctly. If displaying Bold Italic instead of Regular is no problem for you, then it’s no problem for me.
And there is no hatred. The day I start wasting my hatred on browser bugs is the day I hang it up.
Regards,
Rich

By: David

David — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:02:49 +0000

Strange… I take it that Fx3.6 is the reference that other browsers have to compare with. Keeping that in mind I really do not understand what the problem is: I’m using Vista and the testpage looks good on O10.50 – almost the same as on Fx3.6 aside from the synthesized parts. Out of the 30 lines of text to compare, Opera breaks 3, IE8 breaks 27, Chrome4 breaks 21. So where is all the hatred coming from? 3 lines wrong in a pre-alpha snapshot?

I was using @font-face on my blog for a while. The only browser breaking up was (surprise!) Firefox, due to “security resctrictions”. A lame excuse, imho.

By: hi

hi — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:20:26 +0000

Snapshot has another meaning? Whatever gave you that idea? It has the meaning it has. It’s a build released for testing.

If you want people to discuss anything of substance in your posts, maybe you should focus more on substance, and less on flaming and trolling?

By: Richard Fink

Richard Fink — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:41:02 +0000

Thanks for the info, now I know that in Operaland, “snapshot” has another meaning.
So, before I wrote this post, I downloaded the “snapshot”. And found @font-face messed up beyond diagnosis. A bug report is besides the point. You’ve got an infestation. I provided a solid test page. Something along the lines that a browser company working on an @font-face implementation must surely already have if you’re going to measure conformance.
And I notice you haven’t taken substantive issue with anything I’ve said in my “rant and rave”.
I like Opera, I want my code to work in it. It’s holding me and other web developers back.
Seriously.

By: hi

hi — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:52:42 +0000

In other words, the “snapshot” is a blog post by Opera desktop devs reporting on all the improvements they’ve made in 10.5.

No, a snapshot is an Opera build released specifically to allow people out there to test unfinished Opera versions.

If you want them to get it right, the right way to do it is to report bugs.

But then I guess ranting and raving is much easier.

By: Richard Fink

Richard Fink — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:18:26 +0000

Will do, Paul. Tweet it, baby. Enough of this. They might as well disable @font-face completely for the time being if this is all they’ve got.
rich

By: Paul Irish

Paul Irish — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:50:07 +0000

Sweet, good coverage, Richard.
There are some bug reports mentioned on the Opera post.. Check, if you can, if your issues are covered.
I’d also leave them a link to this post over there.