RE: [css-fonts] Is it possible to select a vertical variant in a font?

Thank you John for your prompt reply.

I agree that prepending "@" isn't a good way to go. I'm thinking to display some of glyphs from the vertical glyph set of a font in my product plan, and wondering if there's a better and standardized way to do it. It sounds like the answer is no.

Is it possible to consider for future additions? If CSS is going to support font variants feature in OpenType--although I'm not sure if similar feature is available in other font format but I guess so--maybe vertical could also be added as part of the efforts. I couldn't find that kind of variants support either though.


Regards,
Koji Ishii

-----Original Message-----
From: John Daggett [mailto:jdaggett@mozilla.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 12:18 AM
To: Ishii Koji
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css-fonts] Is it possible to select a vertical variant in a font?

Ishii-san,

> I'm wondering if it's possible to select a vertical variant using CSS, 
> either in current recommendations or in any drafts.
> 
> I know I can prepend "@" to the font-family to do that, but it's not 
> cross-platform, and some browsers do not support this even on Windows.

As with other vertical text related issues, there's currently no defined support for this in CSS, either in 2.1 or CSS3.  The method you mention (appending the '@') is *not* what I would recommend as a proposal, modern font formats such as OpenType include support for rendering either horizontal or vertical glyph forms (if the font provides them).
So in this case, user agents would automatically render using vertical forms when writing-mode is set to vertical.  That way the author can easily specify fonts once, for either writing-mode, rather than relying on platform-specific naming schemes like this.

Regards,

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2010 15:29:27 UTC