Better typography with Firefox 3

Make your web typography prettier in Firefox 3.

Firefox 3 was released into the wild last week, and it has some really great improvements. However, the improvement I was most interested in was the new CSS support for kerning and ligatures in typography. Finally, better typography for the web. It seems to work pretty well, too. Hopefully Safari and Opera will catch up on these features too (I won’t hold my breath for Internet Explorer support).

OpenType has some great examples.

If you want to enable kerning and ligatures for browsers which support it (currently just FF3), here’s the syntax:

text-rendering: auto;
Default. Gecko (Firefox’s rendering engine) will make educated guesses about when to optimize for speed, legibility, and geometric precision while drawing text

text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;
Disables kerning and ligatures.

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
Enables kerning and ligatures.

text-rendering: geometricPrecision;
Enables kerning.

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