Re: [css3-text] script categories, 'bicameral', 'discrete', Unicode links and more

On 04/15/2011 09:24 PM, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>
> What I'm driving at with this example is that the acceptability of certain styles of layout (hyphenation, letterspacing for
> justification, letterspacing for emphasis) are definitely not associated with the script (and not associated, as someone
> helpfully suggested, with the element) but with local conventions (language and or region).

This is true, but I think the ability of the script to accept spacing
without looking broken can be considered a script property. Spacing
between Arabic characters is, afaict, very broken. Spacing between
Latin characters is permissible, even if it's not used for justification
in German due to its precedence for emphasis. That's a stylistic preference,
not a script-based constraint, and it can be chosen since CSS1 by setting
letter-spacing to an explicit value.

> PS: on hyphenation the Unicode forum (http://unicode.org/forum) just recently gave an exception to the dictum "Arabic is never
> hyphenated" (turns out to be false on the script level, but true on the language level. Uighur, written in Arabic script, can
> apparently be hyphenated).

Yeah, I have photocopies of that from my trip to China back in 2005. :)
That's why CSS3 Text has an explanation of shaping hyphenated Arabic.

~fantasai

Received on Saturday, 16 April 2011 07:31:37 UTC