Re: Proposal: add a "small-caps" value to "font-synthesis"

Myles Maxfield wrote:

> The font-synthesis CSS property is a way for authors to opt-out of
> synthesized font traits such as bold or italics. It seems reasonable
> to add small-caps to this set. Using "font-synthesis: small-caps;"
> would specify that, if a small-caps font cannot be found, to use a
> non-small-caps font without synthesizing smaller, capital, text.

I think this would be possible to add but I wonder whether it's really
necessary. What's your thinking behind wanting to add it? Outside of
Firefox, fake small caps is what users always see when font-variant:
small-caps is used. Fake bolding and obliquing may or may not be shown
depending upon the font family.

Alan Stearns wrote:

> I like the idea of disallowing shrunken small caps, but font-synthesis
> appears to be specified in the reverse of your usage:
> “font-synthesis:weight;” allows smearing and “font-synthesis:none;” is
> the setting to disallow it. That makes it difficult to add new
> categories of synthesis blocking using that property.

While theoretically this might have some merit, I don't really think
this is an issue in practice. Changing the initial value doesn't change
what user agents do currently, since by default all of these synthesized
effects are allowed. Firefox is the only browser supporting this
currently so it's not really in wide use. Tweaking the property
definition isn't so hard. But I think question is do we really need this
or not.

In general I think it's best to avoid trying to support synthesized
fallback effects for font feature properties. Effects should be
explicitly opt-in rather than opt-out, which is what font-synthesis was
set up to allow. So I don't see a big need to add more values to
font-synthesis.

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