Re: superiors, inferiors, ordinals, etc. (was: [CSSWG] Minutes and Resolutions 2010-03-17)

John Hudson wrote:

> 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?

The original description of 'character-transform' was here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Mar/0324.html

The definition I gave was:

======

Name:    character-transform
Value:   normal | inferior | ordinal | subscript | superscript
Initial: normal

The values 'subscript', 'superscript', 'inferior', and 'ordinal' imply
the appropriate variant glyph is displayed when available in the font
(OpenType features: subs, supr, sinf, ordn).  When a variant glyph is
not available, a simulated version is synthesized using a reduced form
of the default glyph.  Normal implies use of the default glyph at
normal size.  When the value is anything other than 'normal', the
font-size and vertical-align properties are set to 'inherit'.

======

So simulated glyphs would be used in the fallback case, either when
the feature was missing from the font or when it was missing for a
given glyph.  I realize this is far from ideal, a mixture of
real substitute glyphs and fake substitutes could occur, but I think it's
better than just using default glyphs.

Also, I'll remove 'inferior' when I add this to the next draft, as you
suggested.