RE: [css-text] Arabic letters connecting between elements with display: inline

From: James Clark [mailto:jjc@jclark.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 1:31 AM
To: Stephen Zilles
Cc: Behdad Esfahbod; Matitiahu Allouche; fantasai; public-i18n-bidi@w3.org; WWW International; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css-text] Arabic letters connecting between elements with display: inline

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Stephen Zilles <szilles@adobe.com<mailto:szilles@adobe.com>> wrote:
 Thus, in CSS/HTML, changing to Bold or Italics is not (strictly) a font change.

Surely the model is that you are selecting a font by specifying its desired properties, specifically the family name, weight, width, slope and size.

Furthermore, it would seem that doing joining across these changes is more likely to work (given the Bold and Italic versions of a font family are designed together) than changes between arbitrary fonts. Thus it would seem to make sense to not do breaks for changes between Bold and Italics versus changes in font families.

I would agree bold vs non-bold is more likely to work; I don't think italic vs non-italic is (unless you used the OpenType 'ital' feature).

Unrelated question just for my personal interest: how commonly are italic fonts used in Arabic?
[SZ] I am by no means a source for Arabic type usage. I did, however check the one book I have, Arabic Typography, a comprehensive sourcebook, by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares. Toward the back it has samples of various fonts for Arabic. Although there are a number of families with varying weights, there seemed to be no variants in the “italic” dimension. There were also variants in the CSS “width” dimension (e.g. condensed).

James