- From: John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:25:50 -0700
- CC: www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
Christoph Päper wrote: > Before I read John Hudson’s mail I thought ‘subs’ and ‘supr’ only applied to digits whereas ‘ordn’ and ‘sinf’ included letters, since the descriptions on <http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm> read that way. I would then have had suggested values to enable these separately, but it seems we should combine ‘subs’ and ‘sinf’ anyhow and perhaps we also can combine ‘supr’ and ‘ordn’. Ordinals may have different glyphs than superior letters, as some conventions for ordinals following numbers involve underscores below the ordinal. I would not advise unifying 'supr' and 'ordn'. I am a little late to this discussion, so perhaps the following question has already been discussed: What is the expected behaviour when a character string tagged as e.g. superior includes some characters for which e.g. OTL <sups> substitute glyphs are provided and some for which they are not? As a practical example: many Latin script fonts these days will contain lowercase a-z superior variant glyphs, but not uppercase A-Z. The latter are uncommon and almost never found in typical text typography. They are encountered in academic works though, notably in the apparatus of critical editions (alongside things like superior Greek letters, missing from many fonts that support Greek characters). Obviously, use of an appropriate specialist typeface is the best solution, but with regard to fallback, it is likely that such texts may need to be rendered with only a subset of requested superior glyphs. John Hudson
Received on Thursday, 25 March 2010 01:26:24 UTC