Opera Devs Narrowly Avoid The Sting Of Steak Knives
As I recently reported, Opera 10.5 Beta1 suffered a regression in @font-face support to the point where – Boom! – it really didn’t have any @font-face support. To Opera’s credit – and maybe as a result of these watchful eyes and my big mouth – Andreas Bovens ‘fessed up to the whole mess on the Odin developer blog.
[Disclosure: My wife and I once had a Labrador Retriever named Odin. And as a kid I had a cat named Thor. Biased? You be the judge. 
]
Anyway, there had been so many ups and downs with @font-face in Opera since version 10.0, there was no use complaining and – so in the spirit of light-hearted comic relief – I made them an offer I hoped they couldn’t refuse:
If the next release of Opera has a decent implementation of @font-face, Andreas Bovens gets a $100 Amazon gift card from Readable Web. If it doesn’t, the entire Opera development team will get a set of steak knives as a consolation prize and bitter reminder. (With a grateful nod to David Mamet for the idea of the steak knives.) Fair deal? Don’t let Andreas down, now!
How “Decent” Is It?
As the screen grab from this four-member font-family test page shows, everything is showing up as it should except for synthetic bolding and italic.
Another page I used as a indicator is Ralf Herrmann’s 10 Great Free Fonts page on opentype.info. It’s a fairly complex page with five font families having more than a single member and Opera is handling it just fine.
[Note: The 10 Great Free Fonts page was posted early last year, and the CSS within it has been revised at least once. Yet strangely, it has never been enabled for Internet Explorer. In my next post, I'll get it working for Internet Explorer, too, and show you what I did.]
We Have A Winner! Andreas Bovens Gets His Gift Card
As I said, synthetic bolding and italic is still not working as expected. And I have not tested on any platforms other than Window XP. But @font-face on Build 3273 is working pretty well on XP. I’m not going to quibble. I’ll cough up. Thanks to the Opera developers involved with @font-face, Andreas gets his $100 Amazon gift card. Worth every cent to finally see this.
Now, will Andreas or somebody at Opera save me the time and tell me where and how the gift card can get to him? And – BTW – the steak knives thing is from an especially memorable line in the movie (first a play) “Glengarry Glen Ross”.
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I’m working in Opera’s Oslo office – see http://www.opera.com/company/contact/ for the address
> and maybe as a result of these watchful eyes and my big mouth
I’d say you’ve been instrumental in that process. Thanks for the laugh and the challenge.
And we’re working on the synthetization.
/Martin, @font-face responsible QA in Core GFX Team
@andreas and martin,
I just hope developers at Firefox and Webkit don’t start leaving out features thinking that crazy Fink guy at Readable Web might send them something. Not going to work! It’s a one-time offer. Hah!
Of course, you would have gotten it right sooner or later, as I learned from David Brooks article in yesterday’s NYTimes, Norwegians have the right stuff.
Nine Gold Medals! Wow.
Looking forward to seeing 10.5 emerge out of Beta – it looks like quite an improvement over 10.0.
Regards, Rich
Hmmm…still seeing problems with @font-face in Opera 10.51 running on Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3. Anyone else?
Chris,
Didn’t know there was a 10.51 – they keep pumping out the updates!
I’ll go take a look with my test pages.
What kind of problems? It’s very difficult to diagnose @font-face problems without the page and – in IE<9 – even the fonts themselves.
If you can be more specific….
rich