Shady Characters is powered by WordPress. WP-Footnotes is used to manage footnotes; references are managed with citeulike and are embedded in posts with a lightly modified version of the papercite plugin. Metadata is provided by Dublin Core for WP.
In order, Shady Characters will attempt to use Hoefler Text, Constantia, Palatino, Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Georgia or a generic serif font to render its text. Certain CSS3 features are used which work best in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari, or alternatively Internet Explorer 9 Beta.
8 Comments
Beautiful!
As a fan of fine typography, you should probably look into using webfonts in order to control the fonts used for your site more precisely. Essentially, you can specify a font file in the stylesheet which the browser downloads, so the page is set in *exactly* the font you want, rather than trying several in sequence. Many browsers support them these days. I think http://webfonts.info/ will have information for you.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve used @font-face before, and it’s only really time constraints which have prevented me from doing so here. In the end, I used one of the font stacks described by Amrinder Sandhu. I’ll keep web fonts in mind for a future update!
Hi Mark,
I thought you might like to know that I turned to web fonts for my second interrobang post. In the absence of any web safe blackletter fonts, I’ve embedded Cloister Black from Font Squirrel so that I can render a single percontation mark appropriately, thus: ?
It does rather have the feel of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut — why isn’t there a generic ‘blackletter’ CSS font family, I wonder? — but it has worked perfectly. Thanks for the suggestion!
I absolutely love your design.
Thanks! I’m glad you like it.
Did you design the WP theme your site uses? It’s gorgeous – like an online version of “Elements of Typographic Style.”
Hi Adam,
Thanks! I’m glad you like the theme. It’s based on Sandbox, although I’ve played around with the PHP a little to get it to do exactly what I want, and obviously the CSS is custom too.
You’re absolutely right when you mention The Elements of Typographic Style — that was the main inspiration (and guide), although I took some other ideas from Detail in typography by Jost Hochuli.
I keep on meaning to clean up the theme so that it meets WP’s theme review guidelines, but I never seem to have the time!
One Trackback
[...] Shady Characters » Colophon – [...]