fwd:Fonts

Benjamin C. W. Sittler writes:

 > I agree that numbering style should depend on fonts, but many fonts
 > used by paper-and-ink printers have both numbering styles available!

Thanks for posting your comments and suggestions to the whole
list. As you may have seen, they have influenced the draft
specification [1] in the area of *-caps.

More feedback:

 > What about the font that contains multiple lower-case a's? At least in
 > the context of paper-and-ink publishing, such fonts exist. An
 > underlying problem I see is that different fonts have different
 > available characters, and we need a way to select not only fonts, but
 > *individual characters* by attributes! And, of course, the markup must
 > still be readable with non-stylesheet browsers.
 > 
 > Solution: Individual Glyph Selection

Interesting proposal, but it seems a bit too ambitious for the first
version. It may become more relevant as font servers appear on the web.

 > Another case: what if I want all occurences of a particular product
 > name to appear with a given attribute combination? There is no
 > <PRODNAME> tag I could subclass to change the font style, although an
 > <EM> *might* work... what if I want all occurences of a certain word
 > to appear in small caps? No character-level tag I know of is a good
 > substitute for small caps.
 > 
 > Solution: Generic Character-Level Markup   
 >           Font Sub-Styles
 > 
 > Generic Text Entity
 > ===================
 > 
 > A generic character-level text container tag in HTML 3.0 would be          
 > extremely useful for applying styles to certain blocks of text. I propose  
 > the following tag:
 > 
 > <TEXT>...</TEXT>

This would be very useful indeed, and will talk to Dave Raggett about
it.

 > A better font-selection mechanism is also in order. I propose the          
 > following selection method:
 > 
 > font.family = <font-list>
 > 
 > where
 > 
 > font-list ::= <font> [ ' ' <font-list> ]
 > 
 > font ::= <named> | <described>
 > 
 > Multiple fonts could be specified, with those listed first taking
 > precedence:
 > 
 > font.family = font:Bodoni.Win@/~luser/fonts/bodoni.ttf font:Bodoni font:Times

Font lists are in the proposal, but not quite this elaborate. Again,
font servers may change the situation. Does anyone know the
state-of-art there?

Regards,

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/People/howcome/

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 1995 11:22:33 UTC