Re: [css3-text][css3-fonts] 'text-transform' for Accents

Koji Ishii (2011-03-22):

> I don't know what "synograph" is, nor my dictionary does either, so I'm not sure if I understand what you wrote correctly. But if I do, aren't we saying the same thing?

A “sinogram” – “sinograph” is used almost synonymously – is basically what Unicode calls an “ideograph”. <http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html#17>

> The 'text-transform' does code point transformation and therefore it affects line break, justification, etc., while OpenType 'fwid' does not.

I don’t think CSS should transform characters, just glyphs and only in a way that des not affect other properties. However, does this code point transformation do anything implicitly to default line-breaking, justification etc. that could not be specified explicitly with (future) CSS properties (in contrast to just Open Type)?

It would not be inadequate then to ask authors to use two properties instead of one, if this makes the overall model cleaner.

> The two may produce the same visuals if font designer wanted to do so, but the core value of the 'text-transform' is that it does code point transformation.

The existing transformations for bicameral scripts don’t affect anything but looks (glyphs) and metrics.

> I wrote several use cases of fullwidth a week ago[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Mar/0320.html], and these cannot be done by OpenType features.

Maybe not, but they probably can be done using a combination of CSS features.

> You're right that it uses compatibility area and the area is not comprehensive, but is still good enough for a lot of use cases in East Asia.

Maybe it would be if it were the only option. What would happen with my family name, for instance, if a UA tried “text-transform: fullwidth” on it, since there is no monospaced (precomposed) ‘ä’ in the compatibility block?

> A lot of real web pages in East Asia use it today,

You mean they use the compatibility wide roman characters verbatim? That’s another story and does not prove a usecase for text transformation yet.

> [‘fwid’ is] more modern and could provide more glyphs. I completely agree with you on that.

So let’s use that, in form of a CSS property of course – hopefully better named than “font-variant-east-asian: full-width”, though.

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 12:44:47 UTC