Re: CSS styling for devanagri scripts

On 29/05/13 3:01 AM, Andrew Cunningham wrote:

> An obvious use for opentype features would be a font supporting both
> Hindi and Sanskrit and with extensive ligature support.

Yes, this is the sort of thing for which the OpenType language system 
tags are intended: enabling different layout feature results for 
different language system preferences. So, for example, the Hindi layout 
features might favour more horizontal ligature forms, while the Sanskrit 
might favour more traditional vertical forms.

The CSS language-override mechanism, allowing one to access specific 
OpenType language system tagging independent of document language 
tagging may be the technology that makes this kind of layout 
differentiation reliable. At present, support for OT language system 
tags in software is too uneven for us to make such fonts, and in order 
for our customers not to encounter unwelcome surprises we make separate 
Hindi and Sanskrit fonts.

JH

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 17:01:09 UTC