Advanced Font Features

Typography
#1

Hello people,

my name is Sinisa and I’m a Product Designer. As a daily user of Figma I was wondering about advanced Type Features like: Numbers, Character Variants, Letterforms Stylistic set, Horizontal spacing, and other options.

Does anyone have information or some kind of a handbook about what are all possible font features and how can I apply it to a font as I’m designing one at the moment.

I am using Inter Font on a regular basis and it seems that there was a lot of effort to create all those features. How deas that applies to CSS while coding a website? Do you have any statistics about the usage of those advanced Font Features?

Thanks a lot for your help.

#2

It’s a very good question. The advanced font features are indeed ignored way too often.
I am not aware of any general handbook. There are well over 100 registered OpenType features, but the number of features actually supported by apps and fonts is much smaller. It’s easier to look up the support for the specific app, e.g. “OpenType in InDesign, “OpenType in Word” and so on.
For the web, this could be a nice start: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Fonts/OpenType_fonts_guide