Re: [css3-fonts] Behdad's Feedback on CSS Fonts Module Level 3 Editor's Draft 5 April 2010

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Aug 12, 2010, at 11:50 PM, John Daggett wrote:
>
> >
> >> Right, synthesizing it by running a transform on individual glyphs
> >> would make sense.  You can't do that with CSS transforms, though.
> >
> > Er, just watch me! ;)
> >
> > Try this in Safari, Chrome, Opera, FF4b2+:
> > http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/tests/xtransform.html
> >
>
> But then you can't use auto widths (although you could pretty well simulate
> them with percentages and 'box-sizing:border-box', I guess).
>
> Still, it's a pretty complicated way to specify condensed or expanded type
> reliably, without a way to use it as fallback for when you want an actual
> condensed or expanded font if it's available. Which means  that if I really
> wanted condensed text, I'd have to use a transform hack instead of
> 'font-stretch', and 'font-stretch' would become useless.
>
> I think I would rather have glyph-level synthesized font-stretch when
> condensed/expanded fonts are not available. I would not want drastic
> differences in the typographic "color" (not to be confused with actual
> color) and space occupied by text to be so dependent on whether or not the
> use has a particular font (especially since most people do not have
> condensed/expanded versions of every typeface the author might want to use).
> That seems just as important to me as synthesizing obliques for 'font-style:
> italic | oblique'.
>

Synthesized stuff (or transformations) are not the same as designed
condensed or extended fonts. I would ask two things:

- that you do not *encourage* agents to synthesize font-stretch ("allow" is
okay I guess, though you should understand the results will always be crap)

- that for any agent that does do synthetic stretch, it is OFF by default
and turned on by some additional flag or option.

Regards,

T

-- 
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