Questions on font-stretch

	I'll ask my questions before I try to explain why I'm asking. My sincere
apologies if these are stupid or frequently-asked questions.

	1. Why does the CSS2 font-stretch property accept only keywords, and not
percentages?
	2. Does CSS2 or 3 happen to have a vertical analogue to the font-stretch
property?

	Now, on to my reasons, which you are all free to ignore. I'm trying to take a
stab at converting Quark XPress Tag formatting strings into roughly-equivalent
CSS. (Insert obligatory tilting-at-windmills image here. It's as much for my own
CSS education as anything else; I don't expect the result to be terribly
practical in real-world use.)

	Quark has settings for both horizontal and vertical font scaling, though only
one of these can be set at a time (that is, you can stretch horizontally OR
vertically, but to do both you should change the font size -- which makes a
certain amount of sense). The values for these settings are in percentage [of
current font size], thus my first question.

	Handling condensed fonts is fairly simple (since 0% < all possible condensed
values < 100%), but one can theoretically expand a font to infinity, so mapping
percentages to keywords is a little tough. I'm checking with a typesetting-guru
friend of mine for likely places to draw boundaries, but obviously it'd be
easier if I could just leave the percentage as the value.

	Vertical scaling is causing me headaches. I can multiply the vertical-scale
percentage by the font size and make that the value of the font-size property
(or just use that percentage if for some reason I can't get at the font size),
but that scales the font vertically *and* horizontally. To get the correct
effect, I then have to make a guess at which keyword to use for the font-stretch
property.

	Unless there's something I'm completely missing?

Dorothea
--
Dorothea Salo
XML/OEB Developer, OverDrive, Inc.
dsalo@overdrive.com

Received on Thursday, 30 August 2001 11:40:50 UTC