Re: [css3-text] fullwidth punctuation kerning

Eric Muller wrote:

> The spacing behavior of East Asian text cannot be implemented via
> the OpenType kern feature, and in practice is not. Consider the
> first example and the case where the  〔 and  the (  come from
> different fonts or are at different point size; the 'kern' feature
> will therefore not necessarily "see" both glyphs. Furthermore, the
> rules for aki behaviors are really style rules and vary from one
> place/user/document to another. You can already see in the JLREQ
> document three different sets of values, and a layout engine like
> InDesign offers a dozen or so built-in sets of values, and lets the
> user change them arbitrarily. This implies that nothing can be
> usefully be built in the fonts.

My initial concern about this feature was that specifying manual
kerning would conflict with the kerning data in the font.  But if this
isn't a problem in practice, rather than remove this property I think
we should simply mark this as requiring more study to determine the
right set of properties authors need in this situation, properties
that cover both the style choices noted in JLREQ and choices commonly
used by Indesign users.

John Daggett

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 02:10:17 UTC