Re: font-family: IPA

> [Original Message]
> From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
>
> On Sunday, May 9, 2004, 10:50:05 PM, Ian wrote:
>
>
> IH> On Sun, 9 May 2004, Ernest Cline wrote:
> >>
> >> [no way to detect IPA fonts]
>
> IH> Not really much point adding it to CSS then.
>
> I agree that a special-case addition to CSS is not needed.
>
> Puzzled by the references to Panose (a system of describing
> Latin glyph design axes) to this - the correct descriptor is clearly
> unicode-range.

But you see, as far as the UTC is concerned, IPA is just Latin
characters with the correct font, so in theory Panose would
be appropriate, if they had the necessary combination of
descriptor digits, but it doesn't.

> http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#dataqual
>
> IPA extensions is the 0250 block (0250 to 02AF)
>
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf
>
> so describing a font as an IPA font is a case of
>
> @font-face {
>  unicode-range: 25?;
>  font-family: WhateverIPA;
>  font-src: url(http://example.org/fonts/ipa/Whatever.svg) format(svg)
>  }

Are there any UA's that actually try to do intelligent font matching?
And if there are, do they search all local fonts for a possible match?

I thought that @font-face required you to list all potential matches.
Unless it can search among all local fonts (checking first the ones
given in the 'src' descriptor of course) then it does not achieve
what I was hoping for from .phonetic {font-family:IPA}

Given the mess that @font-face is in at the moment, this approach
while messy might solve the problem.  The lack of interoperable
@font-face implementations is probably why I didn't think of this
in the first place, especially since I didn't  want to have to care about
providing a list of font names.  For the purposes envisaged, this is
nowhere near as elegant as adding one keyword to 'font-family'
would be.

If at this point intelligent font matching is just a six year old paper
specification, it still might make sense to add another keyword.
I am aware of the slight degree of backward compatibility it would
cause, but I seriously doubt that a font named "IPA" would be
anything other than an IPA font, so I wouldn't consider it a serious
problem if anyone had left the quotes off the font name and
expecting to get the font named IPA instead of just a font that
correctly handles IPA.

Received on Monday, 10 May 2004 10:13:19 UTC