Re: Advanced font features and related text features in CSS levels 3 and 4 [css3-fonts] [CSS3 Text] [css3-text-layout] [css4-fonts] [css4-text] [css4-text-layout] from John Daggett on 2008-06-10 (www-style@w3.org from June 2008)

From: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:30:19 -0700 (PDT)
To: Etan Wexler <ewexler@stickdog.com>
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Message-ID: <24389364.350681213090219599.JavaMail.root@cm-mail02.mozilla.org>

Thanks Etan for taking the time to think about these.

I completely agree, it would be really wonderful to allow authors more typographic control over their fonts, including the ability to enable advanced typography features supported in technologies like OpenType.  Control over ligatures, alternate forms and numeric forms would be really useful.  

The tricky part about the syntax is whether it should be supported via new font properties as you propose or a mechanism that ties the properties to a given font (maybe via new @font-face syntax?).  Considering how these are applied in OpenType, AAT and Flash 10 all make interesting examples. 

Sadly, it appears that Apple is moving towards supporting advanced typography via OpenType rather than AAT, but I still think the ATSUI API is an interesting example of how to expose these features.

Cheers,

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

Received on Tuesday, 10 June 2008 09:30:59 UTC