RE: [css3-text] fullwidth punctuation kerning

Hi John,

I'm sorry for my ignorance but could you please explain what the "well designed (OpenType-wise)" font is?

If you're talking about fonts with variable width for punctuation characters, well, it's true that we'd need to define behavior for such fonts. It'll probably do not trim, but in some cases we need to add spaces instead.

Or does such font include variable spacing depending on the combinations of two characters?


Regards,
Koji Ishii

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of John Daggett
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 5:16 PM
To: Ambrose LI
Cc: www-style; www-font
Subject: Re: [css3-text] fullwidth punctuation kerning

Ambrose Li wrote:

> > Section 7.3 of the CSS3 Text spec details a property that 
> > effectively controls kerning on a small subset of CJK punctuation characters:
> >
> >  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#punctuation-trim

> >
> > I don't quite see the necessity of of an author level property to 
> > control this unless it's something that is really controlled at an 
> > author level stylistically.  In fact, supporting this in a browser 
> > that uses an OpenType layout engine would effectively require
> > *undoing* layout based kerning information contained in fonts, 
> > especially since the default is 'none'.
> >
> > I think it would be better omit this property and let the text 
> > layout engine handle this in conjuction with well-designed fonts.
> 
> I think I agree with you in principle, but as far as I know only 
> Japanese fonts are "well designed" (OpenType-wise). Chinese fonts, as 
> far as I know (but I may be wrong) do not generally contain any such 
> information. So whoever proposed the property probably had Chinese 
> fonts in mind.

Right, I seem to recall this feature being discussed in conjunction with MS Gothic which has the same issues.  I guess I don't feel we should be adding new CSS properties to band-aid old fonts, that's bass ackwards.

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 28 September 2010 09:55:54 UTC