Twelve years after I first created them, I'm getting ready to release updated versions of my 'historic' fonts. A lot of new font technology has arisen since they were first released, and I'm taking advantage of some nifty features of Unicode and OpenType to make them much easier to use (at least in applications which support those features, like InDesign, or Firefox 3.5).

And there's the rub - out of eight browsers that I've tried, only Firefox supports the OpenType features like contextual alternates and ligatures that are built into the fonts - and then, only on Windows (not on Linux).

Also disappointing is the inconsistent support for the CSS3 @font-face tag, which allows a browser to download and use a font that's not installed on the system.

* Google Chrome can use @font-face, but only if the --enable-remote-fonts command-line switch is used.

** Internet Explorer 8 does not support does support downloading of TrueTupe or OpenType format fonts with @font-face - just their own, formerly proprietary EOT format. While it is possible to convert TrueType/OpenType fonts to EOT format, this requires maintaining twice the number of font files in order to support IE8 users.

The exciting thing about Firefox 3.5's support is that anyone browsing a page using my fonts will automatically see them as intended, archaic letters and ligatures and all, even without the fonts installed on their system. Anyone else will just see the fonts without the archaic characters and ligatures, at best; at worst, just their default fallback fonts.

Add to that the fact that there's currently no way to turn the various typographical features on or off via CSS, and it looks like it'll be a little while before the Web world can compete with InDesign for proper, more-or-less automatic representation of historical documents.