Re: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

fantasai wrote:

>>> But when all the glyphs are available, leaving some wiggle room to
>>> the implementation seems counter productive if the only way they
>>> can deviate from our preferred behavior is by being worse.
>>
>> Right. To use small-caps as an analogy: if the font has the small
>> caps glyphs you need you're supposed to use them. But if they're
>> not present there is no strict definition of what fallback you
>> should use. css3-fonts only says UAs 'should simulate a small-caps
>> font, for example by…' scaling uppercase glyphs. This leaves the
>> door open to UA innovation when the type designer didn't do the job.
> 
> This isn't quite the right argument here. The author isn't
> requesting half-width glyphs. The author is requesting
> that these glyphs be combined and made to fit within 1em.

Which is precisely one of the intended uses of the half-width,
third-width and quarter-width variants.  I think the analogy is
perfectly consistent with small caps and italics, authors expect that
if the capability exists in the font the user agent will use that
capability before using some synthetic replacement as a fallback.

> Sometimes half-width glyphs is the right way to do that.
> Sometimes you get better results just with proportional-width
> glyphs, because of differences in the width of the glyphs.
> Half-width glyphs have a mono-space characteristic; narrow
> characters are made to look wider, wide characters squashed
> to be narrow. If you combine a narrow character with a wide
> one, sometimes that fits within 1em without the squashing
> and stretching, and that result looks better than flipping
> into a monospaced glyph set.

The 99% use case for tatechuyoko is digits and I don't think the
argument you're making applies at all to any of the width variations
of digits.

As for the non-digit case, could you give a concrete example of the
case you're thinking of where a set of two half-width variants don't
combine well?  Preferably using a real font such as one of the fonts
in the Hiragino or Kozuka families?

I think if a tatechuyoko run includes characters that lack the proper
width variants, then I'm fine leaving the precise details up to the
user agent.  But if all characters do have proper width variants, then
the user agent should use them, that's what they were designed for.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 02:27:43 UTC