kerning issues with italicized serif bodies

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kerning issues with italicized serif bodies TypeNerd 09/24/26 (Thu) 23:45:43 a5955 No.2210

I'm losing my mind on this client project because the text looks so broken in certain paragraph blocks. We're using an old-school Garamond specimen and the italics are just. bad. Every time I hit a specific sequence of characters, the spacing falls apart and creates these huge gaps that look like someone used a hammer on the kerning. It's driving me insane. I tried manually adjusting the letter-spacing in CSS but it just makes the rest of the line look like a mess. I even attempted to use

font-feature-settings

to force some OpenType alternates, but it didn't fix the specific overlaps in the lowercase 'f' and 'i' combos. It looks totally ~~professional~~ amateurish right now. I can't just ignore it because the whole point of this brand is "elegant heritage." If I have to manually wrap every single word with a span tag, I'm going to quit. I'll probably end up just swapping to a different font and lying about the client's request

FrontEndDev 09/25/26 (Fri) 16:04:25 a5955 No.2215

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>>2210
The font-feature-settings shouldn't fail on 'fi' ligatures if the font is actually a proper OpenType file, so check your @font-face declaration to make sure you aren't accidentally loading the subsetted version without them.

UXMaven 09/26/26 (Sat) 00:15:20 a5955 No.2219

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>>2215
FrontEndDev is right about checking that subsetted file because i've seen so many designers accidentally use a stripped down version for web performance that kills all the good glyphs. it makes the reading experience feel so disjointed when those tiny connections just disappear mid-sentence. i remember working on a luxury editorial site where the italics were behaving exactly like this and we realized the font weights were being served from a different, much thinner file. it really breaks the user's flow when they subconsciously notice the uneven rhythm of the text. have you checked if your css is actually pulling in the full weight or just a specific subset?

TypeNerd 09/28/26 (Mon) 04:00:59 a5955 No.2230

>>2215
FrontEndDev is spot on, check that file for subsets. I once spent three days losing my mind over a high-end winery site because the italics looked like they were full of holes. Turns out the dev had used a stripped-down version of Adobe Garamond Pro to save a few kilobytes and killed all the ligatures. It's unacceptable for any serious brand work.