Re: Questions on font-stretch

Dorothea Salo wrote:

>   1. Why does the CSS2 font-stretch property accept only 
keywords, and not percentages?

Because it is intended to ensure that things like Helvetica Condensed
and helvetica are in the same font family in CSS terms.

People generally got the idea of bold and italic but still often one saw
font-family: whatever-condensed; font-weight: normal

and so on. Font-stretch attempts to correct this.

It is however part of a font selection mechanism; it is not meant for
applying geometric transformations to fonts. For that, use SVG.

>         2. Does CSS2 or 3 happen to have a vertical analogue to the font-stretch
> property?

No because there do not seem to be any 'tall' or 'short' fonts.


>         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). 

OK so you scale up preserving the aspect ratio and then you stretch
asymmetrically to get the precise look? This is easy to do in SVG. CSS2
does not cover it.

Incidentally, feel free to ask Quark about their forthcoming SVG support
which they alluded to in a public forum some time ago.

-- 
Chris

Received on Thursday, 30 August 2001 13:03:05 UTC