RE: [css-text] Arabic letters connecting between elements with display: inline

My question is: should the characters that are not joined take the shapes they would have as if they were joined?As with Arabic hyphenation? (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#hyphens-property) (Someone whose language is Arabic might best answer this.)
(Also, and this question is for everyone, are there currently published books with examples of boldfaced or italic text? From what Najib says boldfacing is used for emphasis, but not so much italicizing; I think it will be unlikely that we will find examples that have a single letter in a word emphasized with boldfacing, but I thought I'd ask anyway)
Changing font color should not and obviously does not affect joining; changing font style (to italic) might, as might changing font weight to bold;  changing font family which is different from changing style or weight obviously does affect joining.

Best,
--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com


Date: Fri, 23 May 2014 15:42:31 -0400
From: bungeman@chromium.org
To: ntounsi@emi.ac.ma
CC: behdad@behdad.org; matitiahu.allouche@gmail.com; fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net; public-i18n-bidi@w3.org; www-international@w3.org; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css-text] Arabic letters connecting between elements with  display: inline

Note that Chrome's behavior is obviously incorrect and is not intentional in any way. See crbug.com/6122 (yes, it's a four digit bug in Chromium).



On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Najib Tounsi <ntounsi@gmail.com> wrote:


  
    
  
  
    I think one should take into account

      - font size that may differ largely from one font to another
      ('Arabic Typesetting' letters are small compared to others),

      - ligatures, different shapes of same Arabic letters,

      - isolated (non joining) letters should (or not) have diacritic

      

      I share two screen shots (hope self-explained) from Mozilla and
      Chrome

      In the second line of Arabic, I have added U+200D, the zwj
      character, to force the joining. 

      

      Mozilla

      

      

      Chrome

      

      

      

      (source here http://196.200.140.8/Tests/testJoinOrNot.html)

      

      I prefer the Gecko approach: if joining is not to be broken this
      should apply ONLY to change in color. Moreover, even with the zwj
      control character, Mozilla BREAKS the joining when font or size
      change. 

      

      Best regards,

      

      Najib

      

      

      On 5/22/14 8:09 PM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

    
    
      On 14-05-22 03:28 AM, Matitiahu Allouche wrote:

      
        Fantasai wrote: " I don't think change of font or color should cause a joining break, however."

I agree that change of color should not mandate a joining break. On the other hand, a change of font, or a change of size in the same font, seems to make joining across the change very difficult technically. It would be quite extraordinary that letters from two fonts crafted by different designers join properly.
If the technical hurdle is such that there is little chance that implementations will overcome it, then it might be better to pronounce that there will be no joining across font or size changes.

      
      I disagree.  Joining should NOT be broken even if font changes.  Using a bold
font to highlight a letter in print is a valid use.  It's hard.  But the
alternative is wrong.  Whether user uses a different font weight or a
different color to highlight shouldn't affect the correctness of the script
behavior.