RE: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

-----Original Message-----
From: fantasai [mailto:fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net] 
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 6:26 PM
To: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

On 07/08/2013 03:48 PM, Sylvain Galineau wrote:
>
> Florian 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.

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.

SZ: You seem to be assuming that the proportional width glyphs will be kerned because in many fonts, the proportional width number glyphs have a fixed width to allow alignment of numbers. If they are fixed width, then they are unlikely to give better results than the 1/2 or 1/3 width characters that are designed for Tate-chu-yoko. 

If, however, you are talking about tate-chu-yoko with non-numeric characters, then, perhaps, proportionally spaced glyphs may do a better job. But, it is also likely that in this case, there will not be 1/2 width glyphs for the characters that are being tate-chu-yoko'd.

Steve Z.

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 04:20:48 UTC