You can check out "font dithering" if you look at the Gotham fonts used on Obama's site.
It actually uses two fonts, each with a random half the characters, and missing the other random half. The "font-face" CSS declaration lists both of them, so when a character in one isn't present, it falls back to the other.
Everything looks perfect to the user, but it basically renders the fonts worthless for anything except web use, since system tools or Photoshop can't use character-based font fallbacks the way browsers can. Pretty clever, really.
Comments
You can check out "font dithering" if you look at the Gotham fonts used on Obama's site.
It actually uses two fonts, each with a random half the characters, and missing the other random half. The "font-face" CSS declaration lists both of them, so when a character in one isn't present, it falls back to the other.
Everything looks perfect to the user, but it basically renders the fonts worthless for anything except web use, since system tools or Photoshop can't use character-based font fallbacks the way browsers can. Pretty clever, really.
Interesting idea. How hard would it be to merge the two fonts back into a single one that has all characters?