Re: Advanced Font Features

fantasai:
> Christoph Päper wrote:
>> Would it be acceptable for Japanese to switch display between  
>> Katakana and Hiragana for "font-style: italic"?
>
> No. This is closer to text-transform: it's not a font change, but a  
> codepoint change.
> A new value for text-transform would make more sense.

I know that they have separate codepoints, and already had before  
Unicode. I just never understood exactly why. The distinction to me  
seems not to be much different than blackletter ./. roman (foreign  
terms were typeset in Antiqua fonts in Fraktur German) or roman ./.  
italic (foreign terms are often set italic). Of course none of those  
compare flawlessly.

I'm really nowhere close to have a deeper understanding of Asian  
orthography and typography, so maybe the difference is indeed more  
like uppercase ./. lowercase and hence belongs to |text-transform|.  
I'd just like to have pancultural properties and values if possible,  
keeping the total number low, although it might be counter-intuitive  
if, for lack of a better example, |smallcaps| selected half-width  
forms in East Asian texts.

Another thing I was thinking about -- perhaps not long enough yet --  
is a set of properties for setting the relative font size  
independently for alphabetic (single case or upper and lower case),  
syllabic and logo-/ideographic characters:

   font-size: 12px;
   font-size-bicameral: 1.0em; /* = 12px */
   font-size-logograph: 1.5em; /* = 18px */

Received on Sunday, 20 January 2008 23:19:07 UTC