Fwd: [css-writing-modes-2] text-combine-horizontal a.k.a. Tate-chu-yoko

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Subject: [Moderator Action (size limit exceeded)] [css-writing-modes-2] 
text-combine-horizontal a.k.a. Tate-chu-yoko
Date: Thursday 12 September 2013, 16:25:25
From: Stephen Zilles <szilles@adobe.com>
To: "www-style@w3.org list (www-style@w3.org)" <www-style@w3.org>

All,
I would like to re-open the discussion related to requiring compression 
of text-combine-horizontal strings of text to fit into 1em width. I do 
recognize the rationale for having made the decision to fit the string 
of characters into 1em:  The content in which the text-combine-
horizontal occurs may be laid out in to lines in a variety of different 
ways depending on the container into which the content flows. These 
lines, in Asian languages, may also have annotations, such a ruby, that 
occupy space on a line. To avoid collisions between text-combine-
horizontals, annotations, and adjacent lines the text-combine-
horizontals must be limited to being 1 em in width.

The key point here is the inability to predict whether any two lines 
will collide because it is not possible to predict what content they 
will have. There is another case, however. That is the case of 
headlines. Typically, headlines are presented in a form where there is 
only one line and it is possible to make the line height large enough to 
hold all its content and annotations.

A scan of a number of instances of Japanese newspapers show that text-
combine-horizontal examples with more than two characters in the 
horizontal string only occur in headlines. In addition, headlines may 
have more than 3 characters in the horizontal string. Attached are two 
examples (among many possible) of 4 character horizontal strings  both 
of which go outside the width of 1em.

Thers is also an example which has an 8 character horizontal string. 
This last example, is interesting. The vertical "title" says "dekakeru" 
in hiragana, a fact which is expressed in Latin characters at the 
bottom. The first hiragana glyph ("de") is oversized for effect. The 
Japanese verb "dekakeru" means "to go out to do something". So the 
column below talks about a site that can be visited.

These are just a few examples on many in a single day's worth of 4 
newspapers. This suggests that always requiring compression is not 
responsive to actual usages (in Japan). Therefore,

RECOMMENDATION: CSS should have a way to switch the compression to 1em 
on or off.

If there is such a switch, then there is the question of what should be 
the default value. Because I think the most common usage in Web pages 
would be in headlines (as it is in newspapers), I think the default 
should be compression is off. I understand, however, that book 
publishers would prefer to have the compression on by default because 
there is common usage of 3 character text-combine-horizontals in the 
body text of publications. (This does not seem to be the case in 
newspapers.) We just need to decide what the default should be.

Steve Zilles

-----------------------------------------



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2013 11:57:59 UTC