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

On 4/6/16, 5:34 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

>On 04/06/2016 08:22 PM, Alan Stearns wrote:
>> On 4/6/16, 5:12 PM, "fantasai" <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 04/06/2016 07:33 PM, Alan Stearns wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Elika, Koji - what do you think?
>>>
>>> Overall I think it sounds very complicated... and I'm not convinced
>>> it'll work that great in practice. Wouldn't it make more sense to
>>> be able to have a kerning value for the start/end of the line and
>>> to have a switch to just turn that on? That way the font designer
>>> can do full-on optical alignment, which is the goal in Western
>>> hanging punctuation anyway.
>>
>> No, because it depends on the character - as Jon noted. A hyphen
>> should hang completely off the edge, while an em-dash might only
>> hang halfway. Optical alignment takes a look at the shape of the
>> glyph and makes individual adjustments, it doesn’t apply a single
>> kerning value.
>
>I think you didn't understand what I meant... I meant pairs kerning,
>which would be able to handle this perfectly. You just have one of
>the possible "glyphs" in the pair be SOL or EOL.

Ah! Yes, that could work - and we’ve entertained the idea of letting authors define pair-kern data before. But I think that would have to be font-specific, and apply only when the font matches for both items in the pair. So that quickly becomes complicated, too :)

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2016 00:41:52 UTC