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

On 8/13/2010 4:29 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:
> On Aug 13, 2010, at 11:25 AM, Thomas Phinney 
> <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu <mailto:tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@behdad.org 
>> <mailto:behdad@behdad.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 08/13/10 14:08, Thomas Phinney wrote:
>>     >
>>     > - 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)
>>
>>     Come on, it's not more crap than synthesized *bold*!
>>
>>     behdad
>>
>>
>> Well, I didn't say I was in favor of synthesized bold, either, did I? 
>>  :)  And that horse already left the barn in the 1980s. This, on the 
>> other hand, is a newer proposal.
>
> Well, I guess we wouldn't need to synthesize bold, italic/oblique, 
> condensed, ultra-condensed, expanded, ultra-expanded, light, 
> superbold, italic, etc. if all computers came with typefaces that each 
> contained 50 different varieties, or allowed you to select any value 
> along multiple axes (of weight, stretch, slant, x-height, etc.), and 
> if all fonts were sold that way. But that's not the world we live in. 
> On Windows, pretty much ALL type looks like crap, and bold text is 
> only slightly heavier than normal. At the sizes body text is typically 
> seen, the stroke are only a pixel or two wide, so not many readers 
> (other than purists) would notice the difference between Helvetica 
> Narrow and Helvetica Condensed. In fact, the transformed text John 
> Sent didn't seem that bad.

Oblique is synthesized by definition; sometimes it gives the appearance 
of an italic style.
An italic font is a completely different thing; much as Serif and Sans 
Serif are different.

If I could jump on this bandwagon for a minute:

I'd like to be able to synthesize strike-through and underline effects 
within the DOM.
To do something like that, I need to be able to get the baseline of the 
current font.

Is that something that we can work into the css3-fonts module?
I could then use SVG paths to create nice underline effects, having 
gotten the baseline
offset via getComputedStyle (or something similar). I'm sure there are 
may valid use cases for that data.

And while we're talking about that kind of sillyness -- is the baseline 
offset something that
a user might override via CSS?
I'm not that interested, but it'd allow CSS-y definition of 
superscript/subscript effects.


-Charles