[i18n-drafts] [articles/typography/fontstyles] BRIEF_TITLE_GOES_HERE (#435)

frivoal has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/i18n-drafts:

== [articles/typography/fontstyles]  BRIEF_TITLE_GOES_HERE ==
[source] (https://www.w3.org/International/articles/typography/fontstyles.en) [en]

I finally got around reading the article. That was an interesting read, and I think it’s going a great job at what it set out to do. However, it seems that what it sets ou to do isn’t quite what I thought it would be doing.

The intro to the article says:

> The use of the different styles is not just cosmetic; they often involve one of the following:
> 
> * distinguishing some content from other content (eg. to distinguish headings from body text),
> * representing a regional or audience identity (eg. for the Arabic script, the preference for Nastaliq fonts in Urdu and Kashmiri, or Kano style fonts in Nigeria, rather than the more common Naskh style fonts),
> * incorporating a set of characters that differs from font style to font style (eg. Syriac script font styles correspond to different character repertoires for Western, Eastern, and Estrangela styles),
> * allowing different behavioural features (such as the differences in justification behaviour for Naskh, Ruq’ah, and Nastaliq fonts).
> 

I’d like to drill down on the first of that list, and speak about an aspect which I think is both important, and largely absent from the article: when two styles are used to distinguish some content from some other content, not for stylistic, but for semantic reasons. In other words, if you were to drop the font style different, you may get to a misunderstanding.

For instance
<img width="600" alt="Screen Shot 2022-12-06 at 11 20 49" src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/113268/205792837-88a7110c-0dcd-4461-8823-544e49eb6cf4.png">

In example 1.a, you're asking if you've met the late US president. In example 1.b, you're asking if you've seen the movie about him.

In 2.a, you're reading the evidence of premeditation of a crime, allowing you to bring a dangerous pyromaniac to justice.
In 2.b, you're reading a step in W3C specification about event handling, where a variable is made to point to an object.

In example 3.a, you're wondering which person made the announcement. In 3.b, you're asking if the person is aware of an announcement made by the World Health Organization.

All these examples are about the Latin alphabet, and they're well supported already. The first two have existing generic font families to support that distinction (italics, monospace). The third one doesn't even need that, as we have different code points to distinguish between upper and lower case (though an author might do it by using an upper-case only font on lower case markup, but that'd be a bad idea). But in all these examples, we're making a semantic difference based on typographic differences, and the sentence would be confusing or misunderstood if the visual distinction got lost.

Or consider this (familiarity with the novel or movie Dune needed for this example):
> Paul still lacked practice with the Voice, but the situation was desperate, so he had to try. 
> —Remove her gag.
> The Harkonnen soldier laughed at him.
> —You think I don't know about the witch's Bene Gesserit tricks?
> —<i>Remove her gag.</i>

Before reading the next line, you know that Paul has now successfully used the Voice, and that the Harkonnen are now in trouble. Without italics, you wouldn't.

Narration vs dialog, speech vs telepathy, speech vs internal monologue… italics will be used to draw that sort of contrast all the time in Latin script texts.

To the extent that other scripts do this kind of thing, they should get the highest priority for new generic font families, because otherwise, font-fallback might erase meaningful distinctions that the author tried to make.

The article, as it is, doesn't really talk about this much. The differences in font styles that it highlights are interesting, and may potentially justify generic font families as well, but not with the same degree of urgency as things needed to make semantic distinctions.

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/i18n-drafts/issues/435 using your GitHub account


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Received on Tuesday, 6 December 2022 03:14:49 UTC