sob, that makes sense but is awful lol

lol thats reasonable, Arial is aliased as Helvetica because microsoft never wanted to pay for the licence so they made a clone in house instead 🫠 and they wanted the web to "just work" when someone specifies helvetica i guess sooo

definitely!

that's probably the wrong way to say the arial one, i should say opentype feature settings, but i'm amongst parasocialites and friends, right?

no need to be sorry at all, i am so interested in how this happens lol.

it all looks fine on desktop mac and on android with font features enabled and the correct font.

thanks so much! i hadn't considered different system fonts at all, and i'm gonna add the original issue i'm trying to solve to see if anyone has a brainwave.

windows aliases helvetica to arial i think, so yeah it renders arial and ss02 has that awful style

i had such a strong negative reaction to the idea of aliasing a font i forgot to reply lol.

thank you that makes sense!!!!!

why would you do this (to me, specifically) microsoft?

(my reading comprehension is apparently bad, you’re testing *Helvetica* there, which is not a Microsoft font 😅 though last I checked many years ago it was aliased to Arial on Windows fontfamily.zachleat.dev/Helvetica)

I just tested this on Windows with Microsoft Sans Serif and you’re right that it doesn’t include ss02 — but further, applying that font setting requires information in the font file. I don’t believe there is a faux ss02 😅 (an optional cc to @pixelambacht.bsky.social and a shout to wakamaifondue.com)

someone else mentioned aliasing and i felt bad having a strong negative reaction, but i'm sure they had a very good reason lol.

i assume the font fallbacks of serif/sans-serif are aliased based on the operating system too?

learning a lot, this is more complex than i thought.

i thought not lol

I'm hoping the new generic-incomplete "UI" font-families (ui-sans-serif, ui-serif, ui-monospace) solves a lot of this going forward and picks the best variable system font candidate... but who knows.

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

yeah, helvetica doesn't have a ss02 variant so i think you're right about a fallback (according to font googles)

Oh it is weird that they are all the same! Maybe this is a bug, and it's falling back to some other font's ss02 variant if the current font doesn't have one?

I think fontgoggles.org will let you see all of the alts if you can get your hands on the actual font files... but it's a mac app...