Re: [css3-fonts] subscript/superscript variants

On May 10, 2012, at 4:41 AM, Christoph Päper wrote:

> It’s usually the font developer’s job to create complex substitution tables for that (although maybe for ‘calt’ or the like rather than ‘subs’ and ‘sups’), but I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable for CSS to prescribe some on the higher level – or introduce something akin ‘@text-transform’.

In the early days of our OpenType layout development, we did exactly this in features like 'sups'. We later decided that it was too complex and too subjective to try to build into a font. One factor was that we would have to know about all languages and their standards; and we would have to confront different user preferences; and emerging customs and standards; and so on.

While I won't say there is no good academic argument for trying to create complex substitution tables for all that, in practice (at least in our experience) it seemed to create more problems than it solved.

-Christopher

Received on Thursday, 10 May 2012 15:01:07 UTC