- From: Petr van Blokland via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2016 22:40:00 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
Making the design and code for the TypeNetwork.com family page we ran into the situation where it would be very useful to have relative axis specification. An example is here: https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/fontbureau/series/benton-sans?family=benton-sans&layout=overview This is still based on instance font styles of course, but the construction behind the page is already prepared for variations. We now solved the necessary responsive point-sizes by Javascript, but it would be much easier to specify CSS relative to the current value. E.g. font-weight: +42; font-width: -85; adding 42 to whatever the weight is at that moment, and subtracting 85 from the current width axis value. As the "C" in CSS indicates the cascading nature of all values, making them as relative 1.2em is a logical next step. Apart from the exact CSS syntax, the same would apply for every axis available in the variation font. Calculation also would be nice, as it could solve legitimate typographic requests like "bolder by 40% of the distance between the current value and the boldest extreme of the weight axis". This would solve the current problem of not knowing what "bold" means if the "normal" of a text is already selected as "Semibold". Other use cases: "make the text fit a specified box width by trying within a -5% to +5% of width axis change, otherwise go back to 100% width axis and make 2 lines" (not to mentioning the need for hyphenation, which brings an entire new typographic issue to the table). "make automatic small caps by a specific combination of x/y independent scale and x/y independent interpolation" (saving much glyph-data this way, most existing small cap designs can be specified this way. The same applies for superior and inferior numbers). But this needs scaling and interpolation relative to the current font size. One of the current proposed standard axes is optical size. It is not clear yet how this value connects to the font-size or screen pixels. We cannot trust the OS to decide which [opsz] value to use, because it does not know the viewing distance. And the CSS-developer does not know device-pixels. -- GitHub Notification of comment by petrvanblokland Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/536#issuecomment-250020095 using your GitHub account
Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2016 22:40:08 UTC