Re: [css-text] css letter-spacing should affect tab stops

On Wednesday 2015-01-28 01:17 -0500, fantasai wrote:
> As dbaron points out, we currently use the block font settings,
> so should stay consistent with this. There's a good reason for
> this: so that tab indentation lines up throughout the block,
> regardless of any font changes.
> 
> Note that 'word-spacing' also affects the size of spaces, so
> should probably also be taken into account.
> 
> Proposal therefore is that tab stops are calculated as
> 
>   n*( width of U+0020 plus letter-spacing plus word-spacing)

I think one of the goals of doing this should be that, in at least
some cases, the tab stops line up with text as though 'tab-size'
characters had been skipped.

In order to do that, I think the *first* tab stop should have a
letter-spacing subtracted off (so that it's n-1 letter-spacings
instead of n).  Otherwise lines that do use the first tab-stop won't
line up (monospace-grid-wise) with lines that don't, unless the
word-spacing is an integral number of ch.

I'm also skeptical of including word-spacing at all.  I'm not
particularly inclined to assume that all words are single letters;
it might, on the other hand, be reasonable to assume that in a
monospace context authors might use a 'word-spacing' in ch, such
that the word spacing would continue to match the monospace grid.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
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