Re: a vote for rotation

On Nov 26, 10:23am, Clive Bruton wrote:

> Chris Lilley wrote at 25/11/97 9:47 pm
> >Other comment on Space Cowboy's proposal is invited.
>
> If I remember correctly the same suggestion was made here just a few
> weeks ago (maybe that was www-fonts), and I think universally the concept
> of 90 degree increments was acceptable.

Hey, great! "90 degree rotations of downloadable fonts acceptable, says
Clive Bruton" ;-)

> Chris made a few points about some platforms not dealing with rotated
> text too well, this is probably true. However any that handles TrueType

It was TrueType I was thinking of, because the hinting mechanisms basically
assume no rotation. Alas, my knowledge of TT hinting falls off when the
actual assembler-like codes are involved so I don't know if it is actually
possible to treat vertical  hints as horizontal hints ( a quick look at the
spec [1] seems to indicate that this is so)

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/ttinst.htm

> or PostScript should be able to do this with no problem, and dare I say
> it, if they don't handle those formats, erm... someone should sort them
> out:-)

;-) speaking as a user of a platform that handles Type1 (and CID and Speedo)
 but not TT, I wish someone *would* sort them out.

And of course for bitmapped font formats, if rotation is restricted to
90degree increments, creating rotated 'virtual' fonts is computationally
trivial.

> But some provision for an "alt" tag should be made, just as for browsers
> that can't (or won't) handle images.

This is in the context of style sheets, not HTML taggery, so thew question
does not arise. Browsers that don't understand the rotation will display
unrotated text. In the context of CSS, if a property is unknown the entire
rule is ignored so authors can provide two rules, one for the rotated case
and one which will be used if rotation is not supported.


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 27 November 1997 15:20:43 UTC