Re: [CSS21][css3-text] letter-spacing, word-spacing and justification

On 06/26/2013 01:30 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
>
> The default needs to be that letter spacing is not used for
> justification of Latin scripts. I think the same is true for Devanagari
> and Thai. Enabling letter spacing should not affect justification either
> (although it should disable ligatures such as "ffi" and "fl").

I'm pretty sure Thai adjusts inter-cluster spacing for justification.
Spaces are uncommon enough that lines without them are reasonably common.
See for example https://www.sasin.edu/images/gallery/hrm-course-16jan13.jpg

> Sample use case - a US English legal contract set in caps/small-caps
> with 0.1pt letterspacing should have the words justified to both margins
> and the word spaces adjusted accordingly, but with the 0.1pt letter
> spacing constant.

Nobody's disputing this. For English text, word spaces get first priority
at absorbing space for justification.

> For arabic and some indic scripts with connected characters, it's
> possible something like a kashida would be inserted but I don't know for
> sure.

Kashida are added for justification, but not evenly between each pair of
letters the way we add space in other scripts. I don't know of any examples
where Arabic is given any kind of tracking.

Devanagari appears to accept tracking (letter-spacing) between grapheme
clusters in the form of white space. See
   http://www.w3cindia.in/cssdocument.html#horispace

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 26 June 2013 22:34:04 UTC