Re: [clreq] Prioritization of different typographic features (#458)

This is a common ask for me so I thought I would weigh in :)

Japanese layout (and I suspect Korean and Chinese as well) even in the simplest, most unsophisticated case, has many possible variations, or "right answers" for how it should be set. This often varies with the design intent, the actual content, and other aspects that require there to be many options be made available in the layout engine beyond those normally exposed for simple Latin text use cases.

For example, in more traditional Japanese typography, the box width should be set to an integer multiple of the point size (type body/embox width) and the line fully-justified so the edges match, and the lines with only full-width characters end up being set flush because they already fit perfectly. However, this is not the one-size-fits-all default for Japanese text; modern electronic store ad copy, for example, is often set proportionally with very tight leading and different font sizes with different alignments and even uneven font scaling or other distortion. This implies the need for things like x/y scaling, baseline shifting, alignment to the embox edges, ruby annotations, and other things not usually required of Latin script layout until you get to some rare case of fanciness not needed in an email message for example. But, if you do not support these basics for Japanese, you are not really supporting the MVP, in my opinion. Japanese being a script that draws its history from the first movable type of square characters that then had to be spaced and aligned and distorted differently to achieve harmony with what is being written and for what purpose, has a higher level of requirements than Latin text, and in expressing what is the list of prioritized features of Japanese layout I feel we must remember there is a wide spectrum of variation in Japanese text layout for any purpose, even the most "simple".

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Received on Thursday, 28 April 2022 00:58:27 UTC