Re: RTL characters in Ahem

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 2:23 AM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote:
>
> I may find a use for it, but I'd still prefer to update Ahem.  Reasons
> include, but are not limited to, it's often useful to have blanks where the
> spaces are, as Ahem does, and it's particularly useful to have the
> wall-to-wall painting of the space that Ahem offers, so that you can compare
> shapes simply.

You can use "font-family: ahem, cssot" to get such effects, can't you?
See a test in Chromium[1].

> I also found that it doesn't support script such as arabic
> or complex scripts, where the glyphs change according to context - in Ken's
> font you just see the arabic text in a different font.

I agree with you and John, these fonts do not help much for real-world
testing. That's why I said "depends on what you need." But what unit
tests helps are different from what real world integration tests can
help, and there are certain cases where unit tests help.

Determining the directionality and shaping are usually implemented in
different layers as far as I understand, so when you're *unit* testing
directionality, I guess there are cases the fonts can help.

> Also, i'll probably uninstall it because it seems to be taking a higher
> priority than other fonts on my system for certain scripts when no font is
> specified for the page, which is annoying. For example, i can no longer see
> Thai Tham text, even though I have a font for it - all i see are the boxes
> with triangles :(  Maybe there's a way to prioritise fonts on your system,
> but i'm not aware how?

You don't really need to install, and I guess you should not. I'm not
positive for tests to require yet another fonts to be installed. Today
we could rely on web fonts, and doing so makes testing easier. I
believe there was such a discussion in the test ML a few weeks ago.

Ken's fonts are already available in CSS WG test repo[2].

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests/fast/text/justify-ideograph.html&sq=package:chromium&type=cs
[2] http://hg.csswg.org/test/file/tip/fonts/adobe-fonts

Received on Thursday, 5 March 2015 05:21:14 UTC