Re: Smart-font features

>Sso> On 01/31/2003 07:07:37 PM "Christoph Päper" wrote:
>>>Sounds to me as if you were looking for CSS's @font-face construct and
its
>>>children: <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#font-selection>.

On 02/02/2003 10:47:16 AM Chris Lilley wrote:
>That construct (and its XML equivalent) is certainly where such
>additions would reside, but there is nothing comparable there in the
>current version of CSS. @font-face holds font descriptors -
>information about a particular font. The style properties on the other
>hand are requests for particular styling. So the two go hand in hand -
>one contributing to a list of requests and the other contributing to a
>database of ways to satisfy those requests.


I've been looking at the @font-face construct a little more, and I have a
question about how this would be used in the situation of font features.
My impression is that a sequence of @font-face constructs are used to
define a set of fonts that are available to the document. Several of these
might have the same font-family name, but different parameters like weight,
glyph widths, etc.

Now suppose there was a way for a descriptor to specify font features, such
as:

      font-feature-123: 1

(This would set the feature with ID #123 to the value 1. Not promoting any
specific syntax here, but just suppose.) It seems to me that if you want to
use a single font but with different sets of feature values, it wouldn't be
adequate to put them in the @font-face construct. You'd still have to put
them in the style description as well, eg,

  <style>
    .allLigatures {
       font-family: "My Graphite Font With Ligature Levels";
       font-feature-123: 2 }
    .commonLigatures {
       font-family: "My Graphite Font With Ligature Levels";
       font-feature-123: 1 }
    .noLigatures {
       font-family: "My Graphite Font With Ligature Levels";
       font-feature-123: 0 }
  </style>
  ...
  <p class=commonLigatures>This sentence is shown with only the common
ligatures.</p>

If that's so, then what would be the benefit of using the @font-face
construct at all? (Maybe it's my understanding of exactly how the construct
is used that is somewhat lacking.)

Received on Thursday, 6 February 2003 17:11:41 UTC