Re: [css3-fonts] Minor Confusions Part A

fantasai wrote:

>    # The use of combining diacritic marks creates many variations
>    # for an underlying letterform:
> 
> I don't understand this point. The "a" is not varying underneath the
> diacritics. What did you mean here?

Those are all variations of "a", a base character is modified by a
combining diacritic.  This is an introduction section, I'm merely
introducing the notion that a character can have attached modifiers.

>    # If a document contains characters not supported by the
>    # character maps of explicitly specified fonts, a user agent
>    # may use a system font fallback procedure to locate an
>    # appropriate font that does.
> 
> It took me several reads to understand what was going on in this
> sentence. Maybe replace "explicitly specified fonts" with
> "the CSS-specified fonts"?

Reworded in a simpler way.

>    # Fallback can occur because fonts are not explicitly
>    # specified or because authors fail to explicitly
>    # indicate the encoding used by a document.
> 
> Fonts are always explicitly specified, because 'font-family'
> always has a value, even if it's a generic family keyword.
> So I don't understand the first clause.

If you wrap 'font-family: arial' around Indic text, font fallback will
occur, you haven't explicitly defined fonts appropriate to that text,
in the same way カレーを毎日たべたい appears despite the use of an explicitly
specified font that supports Japanese.

> Also don't understand the second clause. In what cases does
> not explicitly indicating the document encoding trigger
> fallback?

This occurs when encoding errors result in text that appears as a 
different set of characters, such as when 文字化け displays as 文字化ã�‘
instead.

Neither of these are terribly important within the introduction,
so I've simplified the text.

Is there a part B to this?  Can't wait...

Cheers,

John

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2013 03:15:04 UTC