- From: Kenneth Ormandy via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2016 00:11:50 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
I didn’t see this discussion before, but if other people find it
looking for a solution in the meantime, this one of the reasons I made
[Utility
OpenType](https://github.com/kennethormandy/utility-opentype) which
mitigates this somewhat with CSS feature qeuries:
```css
.liga {
/* Gracefully degrade to `font-feature-settings` to
* avoid disrupting the OpenType feature cascade
* when possible. */
@supports not (font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures) {
font-feature-settings: "liga";
}
/* IE doesn’t support @supports; explicitly use
* the prefixed version. */
-ms-font-feature-settings: "liga";
/* Best case scenario, just use `font-variant-*`. */
font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;
}
```
This example is a bit contrived since ideally `liga` is already on,
but I applied the same idea to the other OpenType features that have
lower level properties. As Nick mentioned in the first comment, there
are still some issues that this can’t get around, and mixing these
class names and Stylistic Sets is one of them.
***
One other cascade-related issue I haven’t been able to get around is
mixing `span`s and the Contextual Alternates feature.
A basic example:
```html
<style>
.calt { font-feature-settings: "liga", "calt"; }
</style>
<p class="calt">
<span>g</span><span>l</span><span>o</span><span>v</span><span>e</span><span>s</span>
</p>
```
Even though the Contextual Alternates feature is applied to the
paragraph, each letter in the `span` will act as though it’s the first
in the phrase, even if there is a `calt` feature that should swap to
an alternate glyph. This can be a problem for script fonts in
particular.
For a weird but real-world example, I recently designed a sketch-y
emoji/icon set for a magazine, and I made alternates for the icons.
So, when they use it, if they use the same icon in a row, it uses a
different alternate drawing so it looks more like a sketch:
This is using the Contextual Alternates feature (which I turn off and
then on again when I highlight the text in that gif) and works great.
The other designer I was working with designed a layout that changed
the colour of each of these glyphs.
This isn’t a problem if they are all the same:
<img width="701" alt="screenshot 2016-10-17 17 03 12"
src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1581276/19459927/c9284ffc-948b-11e6-9041-e02af2389416.png">
…but once you wrap each in a `span` they are each treated as their own
phrase, even though the Contextual Alternates feature is applied to
the parent (or even not applied at all, since it should be a browser
default):
I’m not even sure if this would be considered incorrect, but it
definitely seems related to the question of how the cascade of
OpenType features works or should work.
--
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Received on Tuesday, 18 October 2016 00:11:58 UTC