- From: John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>
- Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2013 10:36:40 -0800
- To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, public-i18n-indic@w3.org
On 06/12/13 9:55 AM, Richard Ishida wrote: > [1] do indic scripts do letter-spacing? I think a better way of asking this is 'Does Indic typography do letter-spacing'? In my experience, it is unusual to see much letter-spacing in Indic typography -- i.e. tracking applied on top of default font spacing/kerning as a feature of typographic design --, but there are historical examples of much more widely spaced types for disconnected scripts such as Telugu than is common today. If someone wanted to emulate such typography, using modern fonts, the letter-spacing property would be a sensible way to do so. There are complications though. Do you letter-space whole clusters or also the non-connecting, non-anchored parts of the clusters? If the latter, then you are likely to get inconsistent results depending how the clusters have been built from the OpenType Layout tables. For instance, in the Telugu font I am building at the moment, postscript consonant forms are sometimes spacing glyphs kerned to preceding bases and sometimes combining glyphs anchored to intervening subscripts, contextually determined to affect the best relationships in the cluster. This could result in letter-spacing resulting in different results in different clusters, because spacing postscripts might be tracked while anchored marks should not. > [2] if they do, what happens for scripts with a bar, such as Devanagari? > Is the bar continuous or broken? I would expect the bar to be continuous, but I'm not aware of any mechanism that would make that possible interactively with the letter-spacing property. The head line height and thickness is not explicit anywhere in the font data, and there's nothing like an Arabic tatweel that could be inserted. J.
Received on Friday, 6 December 2013 18:37:25 UTC