Specimen
This page exists to be looked at rather than read. Every setting the sheet makes a claim about is exercised somewhere below, so that the claims can be checked instead of believed. If a rule here renders wrong, the rule is wrong.
The paragraph you are reading is the text stream: Source Serif 4 at whatever size satisfies a 62-character measure, leaded at 1.45, with text-wrap: pretty doing what it can about ladders. This second paragraph is a continuation, so it is indented one and a half ems and gives up its leading in exchange – the book setting, not the web one.
Real small caps, not shrunken capitals
This heading is set in genuine smcp glyphs drawn at small-caps proportions, not capitals scaled down.1 The difference is in the stroke weight: a scaled capital goes thin next to lowercase, and a real small cap does not. Compare a line of each: handgloves in small caps against handgloves faked by scaling.
1 The sheet sets font-synthesis: none, so if the webfont fails to load nothing is faked – the fallback simply has no small caps. That is the intended failure: absent, not counterfeit.
Old-style figures in text, lining figures in tables
In running text the figures are old-style and proportional, so 1848, 1972 and 2026 sit in the line like lowercase letters rather than standing above it. The same numerals in a table go tabular and lining, because columns have to align:
| Cut | Optical size | Glyphs | Bytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roman | 8–60 | 550 | 191268 |
| Italic | 8–60 | 436 | 152312 |
| Caption | 8 | 550 | 0 |
| Display | 60 | 550 | 0 |
Optical sizing is doing something
The display line at the top of this page and the body text you are reading are the same font file at different points on the opsz axis. The display cut has finer hairlines and tighter spacing; the text cut is sturdier. Set font-optical-sizing: none in the inspector and the headline will visibly coarsen.
Word-sized graphics
Sparklines belong inside the sentence, at the size and colour of the sentence. Render times fell over the last eight builds and the cache hit rate went the other way . They inherit currentColor and 1em, take no frame, and are never wrapped in a figure.
Three registers
Display, caption small caps, folio – a 1.5 step apart, with no fourth. The kicker at the top of this page is folio with 0.28em of tracking; this heading is caption; the title is display. Body text and sidenotes are not registers, they are the text stream at 1em and 0.82em.2
2 Which is the honest reading of “exactly three ramps”: three labelling ramps. Counting the reading sizes as ramps would make it five, and counting them as forbidden would leave the sidenotes at body size.
The only accent on the site is spent on links, and nowhere else. Everything else separating one thing from another is size, tracking, or how far the ink has been mixed toward the paper.