[css3-text] letter-spacing and text-justify: distribute

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#distribute

The definition of "text-justify: distribute" is:

# Justification primarily varies the used ‘letter-spacing’; the
# first-level expansion opportunities are between adjacent characters
# (except between letters in cursive scripts such as Arabic). This
# value is sometimes used in e.g. Japanese. 

"Primarily varies" is extremely vague, the exact behavior needs to be
spelled out, particularly what the interaction is with subspans
containing differing values of 'letter-spacing'.

For example:

  p  {
    width: 10em;
    text-align: justify;
    text-justify: distribute;
  }
  
  #x { letter-spacing: 1em; }
  
  <p>aa<span id="x">bb</span>cc</p>
  
What's the ratio of inter-letter spacing between the two b's vs. the two a's?
1:1? Or should the space between the b's be greater than the space between
the a's?

In addition to this, there are still a number of places where letter-spacing
is referred to as offering a "range" of spacing values, when that has actually
been removed.

Example:

# CSS offers control over text spacing via the ‘word-spacing’ and
# ‘letter-spacing’ properties. While in CSS1 and CSS2 these could only
# be ‘normal’ (justifiable) or a fixed length, CSS3 can indicate range
# constraints to control flexibility in justification.

This is only true for the 'word-spacing' property.  Within the text of
'text-justify' are similar references.

Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 11:46:19 UTC