Re: Kerning in latest CSS3 draft

Thomas Phinney wrote:

> I would like to circle back on this, and suggest that there needs to
> be some kind of explicitly "on" option as well. Maybe I missed it in
> the previous lengthy discussion, but if you tell me that Firefox
> will interpret "font-kerning:normal" differently than it currently
> "text-rendering:auto" that would alleviate my concern.
> 
> As an author, I want to be able to use a setting that tells apps
> such as Firefox that I am serious about wanting kerning on, not just
> at its discretion (for example, for text that's bigger than regular
> body text).

Right, I think text layout should be done using OpenType defaults
(i.e. kerning on, common ligatures enabled, etc.) with
author-controlled ways of modifying those defaults.  

I'm going to add a concise explanation of this, that's what I meant by
the "still to be done" item below:

> Still in progress:
>   - Better wording describing OpenType default behavior, including kerning

I'd actually prefer to refer to the OpenType spec directly as the
normative reference for what these defaults are but that spec is
sometimes unclear about whether a given feature is enabled by default
or not.  For example, are old-style figures enabled or not by default?
My reasonable guess is they're not (that makes more sense) but the
OpenType spec just says "Users can switch between the lining and
oldstyle sets by turning this feature on or off."

I think that may be a bug in the spec, if a designer uses old-style
figures as the default glyphs for numerals then the statement above 
will be incorrect.

Cheers,

John

Received on Friday, 26 March 2010 07:37:05 UTC