Re: [css3-fonts] font-specific feature handling

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 9:17 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 25, 2010, at 9:12 , Thomas Phinney wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:56 AM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:
>>> I assume that saying that variants apply to all the fonts that can support them or have them, does not work?
>>>
>>> i.e. if SomePlatformFont also supports the variant, then use it, otherwise ignore the request.
>>>
>>> Are the variants that specific to the fonts?
>>
>> For some kinds of variants, they are. For example, OpenType "stylistic
>> sets" (ssXX) and stylistic alternates (salt) are both pretty
>> arbitrary, unknown (from a programmatic POV) variants — they're
>> "font-specific." Obviously things like standard ligatures, small caps,
>> oldstyle figures and superscripts are pretty reliable across-fonts:
>> "font-agnostic."
>>
>> I'm not that excited about option #4, as it makes it harder to use
>> font-specific formatting with platform fonts.
>>
>> For known features, one can pretty easily categorize them (or almost
>> all) as font-specific or font-agnostic.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> T
> So, option #5 might be "The requested variant applies to every font in the list, if it exists, otherwise it is ignored."
> ?

If option #5 specifically only applied to font-agnostic features (or
specifically disregarded font-specific features), that would be pretty
cool.

That would leave the problem of how to deal with the unknown
features... probably treat them as font-specific. I forget what it was
called, but there was a catch-all feature proposed that allowed one to
use any arbitrary OpenType feature, on top of the ones that CSS
actively "knows about."

Regards,

T

-- 
"The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a
Helvetica scenario!" — http://xkcd.com/683/

Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 18:59:38 UTC