- From: (unknown charset) David Perrell <davidp@earthlink.net>
- Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 19:14:44 -0700
- To: (unknown charset) <www-style@w3.org>, "Todd Fahrner" <fahrner@pobox.com>
Todd Fahrner wrote: > ... Given the woolly, unprincipled realities of font taxonomy, I think a > better approach might be to settle for *fewer* specifiers. I can see an advantage in allowing *any* common weight specifier. The UA simply keeps two heirarchical lists of all the common weight names with corresponding pointers. For example, the 'boldness' heirarchy might include, successively, 'nord, ultra-black, black, ultra-heavy, ultra-bold, super, heavy, extra-bold, bold, demi-bold, semi-bold, demi, medium, book, roman, regular, normal.' If someone specifies 'black' and there is no such weight, the UA simply runs down the list starting at 'black' (or perhaps one or two weights bolder--no compelling reason to avoid a second search for 'black') until it finds a match. No match, use default. (Note that weights such as ultra-bold may appear as Ultra Bold, Ultrabold, or Ultra-Bold in the font's full name.) Can a UA get boldness information except from the font's full name? I don't know about TrueType, but Type 1 fonts do have a weight entry in the header. The only trouble with this is that it doesn't correspond to the weight in the font's name. For example, Futura Heavy has a weight of 'semibold.' How would the user know this? All she/he knows is the font's full name. If a UA needs to parse a font's full name to get weight information, it will also need to keep a list of possible weight specifiers. If this is the case, there's no need to go through a secondary translation process. Primary advantage over the current scheme: If you specify a particular font and weight, you can be assured that it will be displayed accurately on a system that has the correct font installed. The same logic could apply to compression and outline. Perhaps font-style should just be a list of key words. If this were the case, then you could, in fact, specify the full font name without a font-name property. The only catch here is 'small-caps,' which is rarely if ever part of a font name. Many years ago there was some push to standardize font weight, compression, and italicization according to a numerical scheme. Obviously, it never caught on. For many fonts, the relative weight is just too subjective for precise classification. David Perrell
Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 22:15:23 UTC