Re: [css3-font] Extension of font-stretch property

Masahiro Fujishima wrote:

> I have an understanding of typographical fear of risks. But for CJK
> fonts, it is very useful and economical tactic to use
> expanding/condensing method. As you know, CJK font has more than 3,000
> or 5,000 characters in it. It is impossible to prepare ideal series of
> font-width in a font family.

There was a discussion along the same lines back in August 2010:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Aug/0267.html

The one key point to me is that "effects" like this should be clearly
separated out from the font selection process.  So 'font-stretch' should
control *selection* and a separate property (e.g. 'font-xscale') should
control artificially synthesized condensed/expanded.  Bolding works
automagically but that's an unfortunate feature left over for
compatibility reasons.

Note that you can already use CSS transforms to achieve the same effect:

  http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/tests/xtransform.html

Using transforms for this is somewhat clumsy but possible nevertheless.

Note that for body text sizes, using fake condensed/expanded glyphs
isn't going to work in an ideal way in most implementations, since to
really be correct the font rasterizer needs to be involved, it needs to
do the stretched/shrunk rasterization; just applying a simple image
transform on a normally rasterized glyph will produce incorrect subpixel
antialiasing.  Not such a big deal for display sizes but definitely not
ideal for text sizes, especially in the case of high information density
glyphs characteristic of CJK fonts.

So my thought would be to consider a separate property in the future but
not for inclusion in CSS3 Fonts.

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:51:26 UTC