Adobe Blank: Font for Developers

It looks like an April Fools' joke, but the Adobe Type Team released a special font, Adobe Blank OpenType Font , covering the entire unicode table with empty glyphs (over 65,000). The font is rendered using non-spacing and non-marking glyphs and weighs 80kB.



The basis for developing the font was two tasks:

First:

• Using this font as a temporary “ruler”, at the system or application level, you can prohibit replacing the desired font until it is completely rendered with a system one;
• Based on the previous implementation, using Adobe Blank, you can determine when Webfont is really loaded, which by its nature is a hack of restrictions in CSS.

Second:

• Including Adobe Blank as a data URI in a CSS file.
• Font-family declaration : SomeWebFont, “Adobe Blank”; for some DOM elements that contain text and should not have zero width. For example, a span that is positioned absolutely off the screen.
• Check the width of the DOM element: if it is 0 - SomeWebFont is not yet loaded, if more - loaded.

The font is now located on Sourceforge. A mirror on GitHub will open soon.