Re: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

On 07/08/2013 03:48 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
>
> Florian wrote:
>>
>> But when all the glyphs are available, leaving some wiggle room to the
>> implementation seems counter productive if the only way they can deviate
>> from our preferred behavior is by being worse.
>
> Right. To use small-caps as an analogy: if the font has the small caps glyphs
> you need you're supposed to use them. But if they're not present there is no
> strict definition of what fallback you should use. css3-fonts only says UAs
> 'should simulate a small-caps font, for example by…' scaling uppercase glyphs.
> This leaves the door open to UA innovation when the type designer didn't do the
> job.

This isn't quite the right argument here. The author isn't
requesting half-width glyphs. The author is requesting
that these glyphs be combined and made to fit within 1em.

Sometimes half-width glyphs is the right way to do that.
Sometimes you get better results just with proportional-width
glyphs, because of differences in the width of the glyphs.
Half-width glyphs have a mono-space characteristic; narrow
characters are made to look wider, wide characters squashed
to be narrow. If you combine a narrow character with a wide
one, sometimes that fits within 1em without the squashing
and stretching, and that result looks better than flipping
into a monospaced glyph set.

~fantasai

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 01:25:58 UTC