Re: [css-text] Amending hanging-punctuation for Western typography

On 4/6/16, 5:12 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

>On 04/06/2016 07:33 PM, Alan Stearns wrote:
>>
>> Elika, Koji - what do you think?
>
>Overall I think it sounds very complicated... and I'm not convinced
>it'll work that great in practice. Wouldn't it make more sense to
>be able to have a kerning value for the start/end of the line and
>to have a switch to just turn that on? That way the font designer
>can do full-on optical alignment, which is the goal in Western
>hanging punctuation anyway.

No, because it depends on the character - as Jon noted. A hyphen should hang completely off the edge, while an em-dash might only hang halfway. Optical alignment takes a look at the shape of the glyph and makes individual adjustments, it doesn’t apply a single kerning value.

>
>(CJK punctuation has a grid it needs to adhere to, so it doesn't
>want partial values like this--that's why it needs a separate
>switch.)

Right, that’s why I was thinking the switch could be on the content language. If your content is CJK, always use the full width. If it’s some form of latin, use these recommended widths for these character classes. And we can refine those recommendations as we go.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2016 00:23:17 UTC