Some are improvements, and some are brand new goodies to make it even nicer and easier to design with web fonts. Here’s some of what we’ll be working to bring you during April.
Topshelf type features
Many of you we’ve spoken with love typography and have been asking us when advanced typography features will be available on Typecast – things like extended character sets, glyph positioning and substitution, extended language support, etc.
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To get things underway, we’ve got Chuck and Aaron working on some OpenType features as we speak. All will be revealed soon, then you’ll be able to set superiors, fractions and ligatures to your heart’s content.
Undo & redo
Everyone makes mistakes, so the ability to undo and redo a change has been one of our most popular feature requests. Alistair’s started tackling it, but there’s more to do. So it might be late April before it’s ready.
Inheritance
Ok, so there’s a right way to do CSS – define the body and adjust from there. It’s just been (ahem) a bit trickier than we thought to build that into Typecast. But fear not. Inheritance is on the way so your project’s CSS will cascade better than Rapunzel’s hair.
Compare type easier
As mentioned last month, we recently renamed ‘columns’ to ‘containers’. See?
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We discovered that the term ‘columns’ was misleading. It brought to mind behaviours seen in Quark and InDesign – like text flowing from one column to the next. Ours don’t work that way, so it caused some confusion. We think ‘containers’ is more accurate because ours work like divs.
Right now new containers share styles. But we know that a major part of deciding on the right font and font combinations is being able to set the same text in different typefaces and compare them side by side. To make comparison easier, over the coming weeks we’ll be improving containers so you can give new containers a class of their own and make them unique. If you’d like to help us test these when they’re ready, send an email to david@typecastapp.com. He’s our man with the testing plan.
Of course that’s not everything. There’s lots more to come on the road ahead. This just covers the next few hundred meters or so. But that’ll keep us busy for this month.
To hear when these gems go live, add our feed or follow us on Twitter at @typecastapp. And of course keep sending us your great suggestions on Twitter, at hello@typecastapp.com or through the feedback button within the app!
