How to Inspect CSS font-feature-settings Traditional Forms (trad) in Safari Web Inspector

Scholarly publications, cultural repositories, and traditional regional publications frequently require classical Hanja and traditional Chinese orthography. The OpenType trad (Traditional Forms) feature tag substitutes modern simplified glyphs with their traditional multi-stroke equivalents. Safari Web Inspector provides dedicated controls to preview and verify these substitutions on macOS.

Role of Traditional Forms in CJK Typography

Modern unified CJK fonts encode traditional and simplified glyph variants within the same typographic tables. Specifying font-feature-settings: "trad" 1; activates Apple’s CoreText substitution routines, producing faithful traditional renderings without altering underlying unicode strings.

Configuring Traditional Forms in CSS

Declare the traditional orthographic setting in your stylesheet:

.cjk-traditional {
  font-family: "PingFang TC", "Noto Sans CJK TC", sans-serif;
  font-feature-settings: "trad" 1;
  font-variant-east-asian: traditional;
  line-height: 1.6;
}

Inspecting Glyphs with Safari Web Inspector

1. Open the target document in Safari.
2. Right-click the paragraph and choose Inspect Element.
3. Switch to the Font panel in the inspection drawer.
4. Locate Traditional Forms (trad) under the Features section.
5. Toggle the switch to audit immediate glyph replacement across the rendered text block.

Accessible Screen Reader Compatibility

Because OpenType substitutions operate exclusively at the graphic layout layer, the accessibility tree retains standard semantic text representation, ensuring optimal search indexing and screen reader performance.