- From: Najib Tounsi <ntounsi@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:05:05 +0100
- To: "Amir E. Aharoni" <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>
- CC: "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, WWW International <www-international@w3.org>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
Hi On 6/14/13 7:33 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: > Putting space between Arabic letters doesn't make much sense. The > Kashida technique should probably be used for this, and CSS already > has some support for it. Best of all, it should be used automatically > for text in an Arabic script. It may depends on the size of letter-spacing. And then not all arabic letter join inside a word. Putting Kashida instead of space doesn't work in this case. 1- With letter-spacing: ﻏ ر ﻳ ﺐ 2- With 3 Kashidas instead of spaces: غـرـيـب 3- Normal text: غريب 4- With Kashida on purpose: غـريـب Line 2, there's a spurious character (third one, in the middle between ر and ﻳ) Line 4, only two Kashidas are put, between ﻏ and ر and, and between ﻳ and ب Regards, Najib > > Consulting from somebody who knows Arabic typography better that I do > is needed here, of course. > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > > > 2013/6/14 Najib Tounsi <ntounsi@gmail.com>: >> Hello all, >> >> A positive (e.g. 1em) letter-spacing in Arabic looks the same in all >> browsers (according to spec?) as for the Latin languages. But in Arabic >> writing system, letters are joined. So it doesn't look good, thought it's >> still readable: ﻏ ر ﻳ ﺐ vs. غريب >> >> As for the Latin languages, negative space (e.g. 1px), may "tight" the >> letters a bit, but beyond, it becomes an unreadable jam. >> >> So, okay to say that the property is undefined for some contexts or some >> languages. Or that a negative value doesn't make sense. >> >> Regards, Najib >> >> >> On 6/14/13 12:51 PM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote: >>> On 2013/06/14 20:18, fantasai wrote: >>> >>>> Issue 4: The 'letter-spacing' property as currently implemented puts >>>> space between Arabic letters. Does this make sense? Should there be >>>> some other behavior instead (e.g. suppressing letter-spacing)? >>>> http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#letter-spacing >>>> >>>> >>>> data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,PCFET0NUWVBFIGh0bWw%2BDQo8cCBzdHlsZT0ibGV0dGVyLXNwYWNpbmc6IDFlbSI%2B2qnZhduMINmG2YjYtNiq2YbZhiDYudix2KjbjA%3D%3D >>> >>> Hello Fantasai, >>> >>> I think you know much more about the Arabic script than most of us, so I'm >>> a bit surprised to get such a question. The spaced Arabic from the above >>> data URI, at least to me as an outsider, looks quite wrong. At the minimum, >>> I would expect the letters to stay connected where they are connected. >>> >>> As far as I remember, on first approximation, a kashida/tatweel (longer >>> coursive connection) would be used in certain positions in a word to deal >>> with superfluous space on a line (when trying to justify). But better >>> typography would probably be much more complex. >>> >>> I seem to remember that years ago, there was a proposal to have a property >>> relating to kashida/tatweel. Maybe it was something like how much of the >>> slack space would go to spaces between words and how much would be absorbed >>> by kashidas, in terms of percentages. >>> >>> >>> Anyway, I think the more general problem here is how to move on with specs >>> where we know that something isn't correct, or isn't culturally appropriate, >>> or isn't optimal, but it may take years for browser implementers to improve >>> their implementations. >>> >>> Ideally, we could say in the spec that a certain property is (currently) >>> undefined in a certain context, and that would mean it wouldn't be tested, >>> and the spec could move on, and in a later version, once some >>> implementations got advanced and we have better ideas what to do, we could >>> specify that case, too. But the danger is that we get content that relies on >>> unspecified stuff. >>> >>> Another alternative is to specify something as applying to all cases (if >>> that's what the implementations do currently), and in a later spec define >>> another property (let's say cancel-letter-spacing-for-cursive-scripts, with >>> no as the default and yes (and inherited) as two other values) as a fix. >>> >>> Of course the problem is much smaller if it's easy to fix the >>> implementations. >>> >>> Regards, Martin. >>> >>> >>
Received on Saturday, 15 June 2013 13:02:34 UTC