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

On 01/28/2015 01:28 AM, L. David Baron wrote:
> 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.

Yes, you're right. *off by one* I knew it was too easy!

> 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.

I'm having trouble coming up with a use case as well,
but I think it's impossible to argue that leaving it
out is more correct.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2015 06:37:25 UTC