[Fwd: bidi, italics and oblique]

The attached email is being forwarded with permission.

The font-style property spec mentions normal, oblique and italic, but in
some parts of the world they have both slanted and "back" slanted faces.
If a CSS implementation is to generate oblique faces "electronically",
the font-style property should specify which direction to slant (normal
or back slant).

Please consider this for a future addition to CSS.

Thanks,

Erik

attached mail follows:

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Erik van der Poel wrote:

> Bidi experts,
> 

Take all the following only about Persian. (And perhaps Arabic).
I don't know very much about Hebrew or other RTLs.

> Is there such a thing as "italics" and/or "oblique" in the right-to-left
> languages? If so, are they slanted in the opposite direction? (I.e. at a
> slight angle counter-clockwise from the vertical.)
> 
> Erik

1. Yes there is. Both exist. Italics is called "iranic" here, but the
relation between upright roman and italic roman is very like the upright
persian and iranic persian.

2. Yes, they are slanted in the opposite direction.

Perhaps I should comment more. This may be helpful:

There exists three kinds of oblique fonts in Persian typography. I (from
a typographer's viewpoint) prefer to call them Iranic, Slanted, and
Back-Slanted. The Slanted and Back-slanted are just upright glyphs, but
slanted counter-clockwise and clockwise. The Iranic is counter-clockwise
slanted and different shaped just like italic (and I should mention that
this is borrowed from west about 70 years ago).

In most of the situations, the iranic font is not available. This has
caused use of another names: iranic for slanted, and italic for
back-slanted.

For emphasis, iranic text is preferred, but both others are also in use.

--Very much for the first message to the list,
  Roozbeh.