Re: Font feature switches

If I may be so blunt, the problems wrt lack of participation are certainly not lack of enthusiasm for the FO spec, or disinterest in programming to support it, but other things.

These include:


1) the ridiculous inability of W3C to separate what CSS should do and what FO should do;


2) the fact that (at least to a SME like me) it seems like W3C has lost interest in FO, generally, and that disheartens people;


3) related to point 2, the fact that XSL FO is barely advertised, whereas CSS is praised to the high heavens. Very few professional programmers I've met have ever even heard of XSL FO, but they all know about CSS. That is entirely the fault of W3C;


There is a lack of participation because - if I may be excused my blunt language - W3C appears not to give a damn about FO.


Regards, Arved

On 06/21/14, Liam R E Quin  <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-06-21 at 17:22 +0200, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> [...]
> > The problem of XSL-FO is the lack of font feature switches:
> > 1) enable/disable kerning
> > 2) enable/disable various ligature types
> > 3) enable/disable smallcaps and old-style figures
> > 
> > Additionally I can't see any syntax to enable microtypographic features:
> > a) protrusion (hanging punctuation)
> > b) expansion
> 
> We added some or all of these features for XSl-FO 2.0 but were forced to
> abandon that work because of a lack of participation. There's no-one
> actively working on the FO spec itself these days I'm afraid.
> 
> I don't remember if the drop caps and OpenType font feature stuff made
> it into the SO 2 draft or not, but if not, the CSS syntax has
> implementations and adoption so that's probably the way to go. Ask your
> FO vendor to support the CSS properties. It might be worth using this
> community group's wiki to document such extensions.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > There is also proposals for 'hanging-punctuation', but the current version
> > http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#hanging-punctuation-property seems to be
> > very limited.
> 
> Yes - it needs someone to improve the spec.
> 
> Liam
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
> Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
> Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
> 
> 
> 
>