[css3-fonts][css3-text] text-transform, font-variant-numeric, OT case

In <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Mar/0183.html> and before I raised my concerns with the relationships of ‘text-transform’ with ‘font-variant’ as currently drafted – because there aren’t any. I suggested to have uppercased text automatically use lining figures. Back then I failed to notice an Open-Type feature tag that seems to be intended to facilitate just that (among other stuff): ‘case’ <http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_ae.htm#case>

| Function: 
| Shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better 
| with all-capital sequences or sets of lining figures; also changes 
| oldstyle figures to lining figures. By default, glyphs in a text 
| face are designed to work with lowercase characters. Some characters 
| should be shifted vertically to fit the higher visual center of all-
| capital or lining text. Also, lining figures are the same height (or 
| close to it) as capitals, and fit much better with all-capital text.
|
| UI suggestion: 
| It would be good to apply this feature (or turn it off) by default 
| when the user changes case on a sequence of more than one character. 

I am, however, unsure whether this should be left to fonts, i.e. if we can rely on font designers to include ‘case’. Only then it would be enough to couple the OT ‘case’ feature with “text-transform: uppercase”, otherwise there should be additional effects of ‘text-transform’ to ‘font-variant-numeric’ defined.

Received on Monday, 6 June 2011 12:25:46 UTC