[css3-text] ISSUE-229 Combining justification and whitespace:pre*

[Fixed subject to have the spec indicator]

Right now, CSS 2.1 specifies that text-align:justify doesn't do
anything when combined with whitespace:pre or pre-wrap.  As far as I
can tell, this was done due to no one having any good use-cases (and
thus no one knowing how it should really work in some cases).

I've been contacted by some internal people about this, because
they're working on docs stuff.  They want to both (a) preserve the
spaces that the user has typed in, like desktop word-processing
software does, and (b) justify text when the user requests it.  (a)
can only be done with a whitespace value.  (You can't use  ,
because then things don't break properly.)

The troublesome case seems to be combining all of this with tabs,
because you want tab-stops to still line up between lines.  MS Word's
behavior is to only justify the part of the line that comes after the
last tab character on the line, and my internal people say that's fine
for them too.

Are there any other issues with this that we can resolve while I have
the ear of relevant people?  If not, can we relax this restriction in
Text?

~TJ

Received on Monday, 19 March 2012 23:23:07 UTC