typography

A couple years ago I read Jonathan Snook’s Spruce It Up article about subsetting fonts to get precisely the characters you need when building font stacks. Good stuff, and at the end of the article he casually drops the gold. If you only have a limited set of characters in your first font, the browser will just fill in the extra characters from the next one. This removes the need to wrap those characters in special markup in order to give them special treatment. For example it’s become fairly common to use a fancy ampersand from one font and set the rest of your text in another using markup like this: