[css3-text] wrapping text while keeping line lengths balanced

Hi,

As part of WebVTT we've run into a problem of wanting text wrapping to 
have automatically balanced line lengths in captions.

Looking at the CSS Text specification, it looks like this is a new axis on 
the 'white-space' shorthand, which applies only at the block level, 
controlling whether the line breaks are distributed eagerly, like today, 
modulo 'text-wrap:avoid', or whether they are distributed so as to 
minimise the difference in line lengths, again modulo 'text-wrap:avoid'.

Any advice on how to proceed in addressing this use case in WebVTT would 
be most welcome. Short-term I expect we will look at introducing a new 
'white-space' keyword, which expands to the same as 'normal' but with a 
new property 'text-balance' or something set to a value indicating that 
the lines should be balanced, but it would be good if we could instead 
point to something that browsers implement for all of CSS rendering.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 20 April 2012 22:54:53 UTC