[css3-writing-modes][css3-text] Feedbacks from an informal spec review in Japan

I've got valuable feedbacks from an informal spec review for the writing modes in Japan. Here's my memo from the review.

5. Line Orientation

*1: Arabic "ABC" in Figure 7 is displayed as LTR -> probably a problem in FF; IE/Safari displays correctly.

5.1. Orienting Text: the 'text-orientation' property

*2: The description says "this property specifies the orientation of characters in a non-native 'writing-mode'", and it is correct for "vertical-right" and "upright", but "rotate-right" and "rotate-left" are different (affects native scripts as well).

*3: It's nice to have sample pictures.

6.1.1. Orthogonal Flows

*4: What happens if a vertical block within a horizontal document overflows a page in paged media? -> Probably the block should go to the next page (prohibit page break within the vertical block), but the behavior is undefined in the current spec.

*5: What happens if a vertical block within a horizontal document is higher than the page height in paged media?

*6: What happens if the width (logical height) of a vertical block within a horizontal document exceeds the page width in paged media?

*7: How the UA should determine the width (logical height) of a vertical block within a horizontal document when it's less than available width? IE7 uses 100% while IE8 uses shrink-to-fit.

*8: In above case, if shrink-to-fit, can authors specify the block aligned left/center/right? Logical thinking gives that 'margin-left:auto' should do, but it doesn't work in IE8.

*9: The expected behavior for 'auto' logical widths (marked as an issue in the spec). Although we could not reach to consensus, the discussion was valuable. I'll follow this up separately.

*10: Can author specify logical width to be shrink-to-fit behavior?

*11: Can author specify logical width to be "all the rest of available logical width" behavior? bottom:0px?

7. Glyph Composition: the 'text-combine' property

*12: It's nice to have HTML/CSS code for the sample picture.

*13: A request for the 'text-auto-combine' property (it's currently marked as an issue in the spec). A use case was given; authors using text editors would want to set the default value of the 'text-auto-combine' for the whole document, review the results, and then fix where inappropriate (one mentioned as "often context-sensitive" in the issue section of the spec). That requires far less work than applying 'text-combine' to every occurrences of numeric words. Whether we should have this in Writing Modes Level 3 or not was split; some argued we should, while some argued most users would use authoring tools and we should keep Writing Modes Level 3 as primitive as possible.

Miscellaneous: the original intention was to review both Writing Modes Level 3 and Text Level 3, but we ran out of the time. Instead of reviewing CSS3 Text, we had a short free discussion session where I got following wishes.

*14: Wish: non-uniform glyph scaling -> It could be done by SVG/2D Transform if it's a graphic rather than text layout, but we don't have a good method in text layout. Some disliked the idea of non-uniform scaling of glyphs. Some wants more, like different scaling factor for Latin/Asian characters.

*15: Wish: text to fit within a specified space using non-uniform scaling -> Same as *14?

I'll work on these issues, but any additional feedbacks/opinions are appreciated.


Regards,
Koji

Received on Sunday, 9 January 2011 11:25:22 UTC