After changing Discord to be in Comic Sans I remembered the Comic Sans Secret Menu article by @spiders, and I've noticed something odd about the font files I have here...
Comic Sans Pro (or Comic Sans 2010, which may or may not actually be the same thing) adds proper italic and bold styles to Comic Sans, instead of just automatically generated ones. Most noticable here is that the lowercase letter t now has a little curl on it in the italic style. Nice. Now, that's the only letter that actually changes shape in the italic style... or is it?
This is the promo image for Comic Sans Italic from the page where you can buy it. You can see that the f has a descending tail, which is a traditional element of italic type (being based on handwriting). So it seems the comic sans I have on my computer, even though it has the OpenType features and real italic style, is missing this one detail which this, even more real italic font, has. Or does it??
Okay... so the specimen was written using some mystical version of comic sans which isn't even the one being sold on the same page. This comic sans is, in fact, probably really Comic Sans Pro Italic, available only as part of the Comic Sans Pro Complete Family Pack:
But if you weren't paying attention you might not realise that the Comic Sans Pro Complete Family Pack isn't just the four fonts called Comic Sans put together. So far as I can tell, the long f is the only difference between the Pro italic comic sans and the non-Pro version. Aside from the "ju" kerning pair which I'm pretty sure is a lot smaller in Pro:
This comic sans (which is built into Windows now) still has the full set of OpenType features (the secret menu) which were originally made for Comic Sans 2010 (or maybe Comic Sans 2010 has even more, who knows). Where it gets weird is that the features do some slightly different things in the italic style. ss03 (stylistic set 3), which enables a double-storey a and g, does one more thing...
It enables the long f! It was there all along! But it's a little weird that it would be part of the same set as the fancier a/g. A lot of fonts go from the double-storey a/g to versions more like what comic sans normally has in their italic forms, and I don't know of any that do it the other way around. Perhaps what makes Comic Sans Pro truly Pro is that you can actually emulate a font family with fancy normal type and italic italics properly. But now we've gotten to the bottom of this mystery, I've uncovered one more secret from comic sans. So enabling the "swash alternates", on the normal font style, gives you this fancy effect on capital letters:
This was already known. If you enable it for italics, however...
I have no explanation for this.
