Re: [css3-fonts] font-size and vertical text

On 05/20/2013 06:19 PM, John Daggett wrote:
>
> fantasai wrote:
>> I'm not sure it's a complexity of vertical text. It's just that if
>> you have a non-square font, in horizontal text its will be 1em tall
>> and narrower than 1em wide, and in vertical text they will be 1em
>> wide and shorter than 1em tall. Right?
>
> So I don't really see the example you're bringing up.  If you're
> thinking of a Japanese font that uses non-square kanji characters,
> those will be rendered upright in vertical text and thus the same
> height in both cases, no?

If the goal is to compact the text, then, no, they'll be shorter and
wider in vertical text than in horizontal text. (It'd have to be done
with vertical alternates for each CJK character, I suppose.)

But, setting that case aside, consider Latin with lowercase letters.
In a font that's actually designed to handle being typeset upright in
vertical orientation, the letters will no longer all be 1em tall.
Lowercase 'a', for example, should be noticeably shorter than lowercase
'h' or 'j' if we're to avoid awkward spacing. This is why vertical
metrics exist, right? Because the metrics for a glyph in vertical
orientation aren't always 1em tall.

> The 'font-size' property determines the height of glyphs *before*
> layout operations. The default rendering of the string "iiiiii" will
> render glyphs of the same height in both horizontal and vertical text
> runs, only the final orientation will be different when rendered.  Which
> one is taller or wider is irrelevant.
>
> You seem to want to describe 'font-size' in terms of how glyphs are
> shown on the page after layout operations.  But that's not how any
> author thinks about font sizes!  If I have 16px text on the page
> that's rotated 45 degrees, I still think of that as 16px text, not as
> 22.6px sized text, even though that's what the "height" of the text
> will be.

Nope, I totally agree with you on this point. :)

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 20 May 2013 13:20:06 UTC