Re: [css-text] I18N-ISSUE-334: 'letter-spacing' and Indic

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 06:32:28PM +0000, Phillips, Addison wrote:

>     that letter-spacing should "break" the joining "bar" (shirorekha) in

Is it proposed that the specification add that this bar "should" be broken?

My information is that this practice is common (or even universal outside of
hand-formed word shapes), but that it is nevertheless undesirable in some
circumstances (such as justification in a newspaper, where the spacing isn't
semantically significant, and isn't intended to be noticeable).  I am also
told that handwriting would not break this bar [other than in the sense that
आरम्भ might be described as having a broken bar].  (As I understand it, these
gaps have become acceptable because they were largely unavoidable when using
moveable type and typewriters.)

I would thus be careful about specifying that this bar should always have
visible gaps when letter-spacing is non-zero.  (There's also the case of
negative letter-spacing to consider, if we were to look at adding such a
clause to the spec.)

I can try to find some more information on this if that's useful.

pjrm.

Received on Friday, 24 January 2014 23:30:25 UTC