Re: [CSS3-text] pixel positioning of underline (was text-underline-position and superscript

2010/12/27 Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp>
>
> I see it a little differently. Font system could have two underline positions, but then it’d be application’s responsibility which position to use on mixed case, and you’re still in the trouble. You put underline to English/Chinese mixed sentence, how should application render it? You put underlines on English words and Chinese words within a same line, how should application render it?

Yes, they should, but they don't, do they? Just like the ellipsis
character should never have been unified with the CJK three-dot leader
in Unicode, but they were, and it's too late to fix anything now.

If I put underline on English words and Chinese words within the same
line, the application determines the underline position depending on
the language of the context:

- If it is an English paragraph with embedded Chinese text,
underlining is an emphasis mark that follows English usage, placed
below the English baseline

- If it is a Chinese paragraph with embedded English text, underlining
(depending on whether it's straight or wavy) is either the proper name
mark or citation mark and not emphasis (i.e., case #1 in my
restatement), and therefore it should follow Chinese usage, placed
below the descender line

This is, of course, purely theoretical, firstly because even Adobe
Illustrator and InDesign cannot handle two underline positions, and
secondly because a lot of web pages are not correctly tagged with the
correct language codes.

> All CJK fonts had English underline position 10 years ago, and as far as I looked at the data, Japan and Korea chose to use CJK underline position for CJK fonts these days. If user wants to use English underline, they can use English fonts.

I am not so sure about this. Most CJK web pages don't bother to tag
English paragraphs with correct language codes. So using English fonts
is just not going to happen. I'm not saying no one does it (I, for
one, do it myself), but it's rare.

> I think that’s a clear and good design choice font vendors have made. I hope you agree with this, but even if you don’t, you still have an option to use text-underline-position:under.

I don't think I can call that a real option, since there's only one
option to choose from. And it's too late to fix anything now.

--
cheers,
-ambrose

does anyone know how to fix Snow Leopard? it broke input method
switching and is causing many typing mistakes and is very annoying

Received on Monday, 27 December 2010 09:11:05 UTC