On Monday, July 23, 2007, 10:38:35 PM, Thomas wrote:
TW> Just to recap what we talked about a few weeks ago: currently (0.45.1, TW> Linux) any font variant names not in the very limited CSS standard usually TW> (though not quite always) *DO* now appear in the UI. However, they can not TW> actually be used. If one of these variants - say, "shadowed" in Gill Sans TW> - is selected the font actually rendered will just be the plain font. In TW> the cases where the variant name is a compound - eg "Ultra Bold Condensed" TW> - then only those parts which are recognised by the system will be used to TW> select the font, in this case "Ultra" will be ignored but "Bold Condensed" TW> will be rendered.
(This is related to an implementation, not to what CSS can do).
TW> I'd really like to stress here that from a professional design point of TW> view, the CSS standard is totally inadequate for text designs.
Thats probably true, although the example you use to show it does not demonstrate that.
TW> There is TW> nothing remotely typograpically unusual about "Ultra Bold Condensed", TW> "Heavyface", "Extended #2", or any of the other dozen or so varients I see TW> every day which have no CSS equivalent.
Note that CSS can indeed describe a font which is ultrabold and condensed. The font-weight is probably 800 or 900 and the font-stretch is, well, condensed.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#font-styling