RE: real vs. synthetic width glyphs

It looks to me that we're in consensus, right?

We all want to avoid UA to use poorer methods such as scaling when all grapheme clusters have the corresponding width-variant glyphs, and we all are perfectly fine to allow UA to do additional tweaking when it can produce even better results under some conditions.

And it looks to me that it is exactly what we resolved in the last conf call.

So, no one is objecting to the resolution, we're just confirming that we are on the same page. Correct?

/koji

-----Original Message-----
From: Sylvain Galineau [mailto:galineau@adobe.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 3:43 PM
To: fantasai; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: real vs. synthetic width glyphs



On 7/8/13 6:25 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

>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.

If the author is requesting a small chunk of text to be laid out in a manner for which the font he has *chosen* includes specifically designed glyphs I think the small-caps analogy is apt. I do not believe we claim the UA should make up those glyphs for him using proprietary magic.

>
>Sometimes half-width glyphs is the right way to do that.

We do not choose defaults for what happens sometimes; we pick them based on what happens most of the time. For tatechuyoko my understanding is that a short string of digits is by far the most common use-case.

>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.

You are describing an hypothetical edge-case. If the main use-case  is natively supported by the font then this is what UAs should use by default.

For more complex typesetting, additional tweaking may be needed, and that is perfectly fine. It seems a bad trade-off, however, to allow UAs to produce inconsistent and/or poor quality results for the main use-case.

>
>~fantasai
>

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2013 12:40:13 UTC