Re: [css-text] Amending hanging-punctuation for Western typography

> On Apr 1, 2016, at 2:00 PM, Jan Tosovsky <j.tosovsky@email.cz> wrote:
> 
> On 2016-04-01 Jon Lee wrote:
>> 
>> Inspired by the options available in Illustrator [7] ...
>> the proposal expands the “hanging-punctuation” property:
>> 
>> hanging-punctuation: none | [ <mode> <character-set> , ]* <mode>
>> <character-set>
>> 
>> 2. <character-set> specifies how a punctuation mark hangs relative to
>> its line box. The marks are grouped into sets.
>> 
>> “latin-primary” characters hang fully outside of the line box. It
>> includes the following characters:
>>  - Single straight quote, double straight quote, comma, full stop
>>  - Unicode Pd that is a hyphen (the spirit of this is to include
>>     characters that would be used to break a word)
>>  - Unicode Pf, Pi
>> 
>> “latin-secondary” characters hang 50% outside of the line box. It
>> includes the following characters:
>>  - Asterisks, tildes, ellipses, colons, semicolons
>>  - Unicode Pd not included in “latin-primary” (em dashes and 
>>     the like)
> 
> Overall a nice attempt. I am just worried those values '100% and 50% outside' are too rough. In ConTeXt typesetting engine both left and right values are specified and they are apparently less coarse.

They may not be as fine grained, but it seems good enough for Illustrator, and based on examples I’ve seen on the web appears to be good enough for what web authors want. I’d also worry that the specific values you cite were tailored for the fonts most used by ConTeXt, where the Illustrator options appear to be the best compromise for the wide variety of fonts used by novice graphic designers (I imagine the experts would tweak everything).

That said, if this were to be later expanded to allow for finer-grained tweaking, then one could imagine an “auto” value representing the best values the UA can provide (which could include your suggested values or even text-engine-driven optical alignment), whereas what I’m proposing is a “simple” value that all UA’s could at least implement and provide a consistent result to the web author.

Jon

Received on Friday, 1 April 2016 22:20:14 UTC