RE: should we remove the kerning property in favour of font-kerning?

On  Sunday, May 27, 2012 9:51 AM
Dirk Schulze wrote:

I rely on the experience of Niko and I hope he answers to this thread as
well. Personally I would continue with CSS styling and am in favor for
dropping 'kerning'. But I have no idea if it is in use somewhere.

A lot of our experiments at
http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/GeometricAccessibility.html relied on kerning
(that is imperfectly implemented in most places). My recent discussions and
observations about Chinese text layout in my visit there, suggest that every
bit of control over the placement of glyphs that can be mustered by the SVG
spec (including SVG fonts) ultimately should be leveraged. If one wants to
ensure that commercial use of text in advertisements, logos and art is
indeed scalable text rather than bitmaps annotated with text ( a poor excuse
for accessibility!), then control of placement, shapes, alignment,
distortion, directionality is all needed. If Cameron's claim 

On May 27, 2012, at 1:22 AM, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> Can we drop kerning, and go ahead with font-kerning?  The combination of 
> font-kerning and letter-spacing can achieve everything that the kerning 
> property can.

is correct (and it no doubt is), then I'm not sure it is needed, but please
keep in mind all the fun and fascinating things that people do with text, in
the graphical uses of it, that SVG ultimately will have to support (since it
is doubtful that CSS will ever have that sort of power, unless, out of
deference to the tail that wishes to wag the dog, we allow the HTML
community to simply absorb all the good parts of SVG into CSS, as seems to
be one philosophy currently at play.)

Glyphs and SVG fonts really are important, I think for staying in touch with
the growth areas of international commerce, science and art.

Cheers
David

Received on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 15:43:46 UTC