Re: ascender, descender, cap-height and x-height

Daniel Will-Harris wrote:
> 
> It's hard to imagine that foundries and individual designers will go
> back and change the tens of thousands of font designs they have to
> fit some standard.

I agree. But perhaps we could get the CSS implementations to apply some
sort of adjustment, as I mentioned earlier (font size: proposed plan).

> What's more, I personally have yet to see any kind of font
> substitution system that really worked well enough.

I'm concerned not only about the substitution case, but also about the
non-substitution case. For example:

  P { font-family: Arial; font-size: 18px; }

Suppose we have the Arial font. I.e. NO substitution. What, exactly,
does "font-size: 18px" mean? Ascender + descender? TrueType's em? Or
what?

> Far better than encouraging substitutions would be to further promote
> the Dynamic Fonts feature already in Netscape and secure, open font
> embedding.

Yes, but that is not in the spirit of CSS. CSS allows the user to
override the author's choice of font. We need to carefully define what
happens to the size of that user's font.

Erik