Re: [css-text] Issue 18: character-based alignment in table columns

On 1/27/16, 6:36 AM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Issue 18 in CSS Text 4 asks:
>>
>>>Is this intended to say that it’s the centers of the alignment characters
>>> that should be aligned?
>>>It’s not clear that’s what it says, but that (or a different behavior)
>>> needs to be specified,
>>>to describe what happens when different occurrences of the alignment
>>> character
>>>are in different fonts. (Further, is that the intended behavior?
>>>Probably the most significant use case to consider is bold vs. non-bold
>>> text,
>>>which only varies slightly in width.)
>>
>> I've been looking at what InDesign does. It appears to align the origins of
>> the alignment character glyphs, which sometimes does not result in the
>> centers of the alignment characters being centered. I'm seeing similar
>> behavior from a TeX package I tried. This is consistent with the printed
>> examples we've found so far.
>
>This sounds like those tools just not considering the case of the
>texts being in different fonts or faces.  I don't think there's a good
>reason to copy that bug.  You clearly want the texts *aligned*, and
>aligning centers seems most likely to get you that result.

I agree. It’s likely this is an edge case that just never got considered or was never considered worth the time to address. In InDesign or TeX, when the problem crops up you can tell the user “If you want those things aligned, use the same font and size.” On the web that’s often not an option, so we can handle this edge case better.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Tuesday, 26 January 2016 19:56:23 UTC