Re: should we remove the kerning property in favour of font-kerning?

Dirk Schulze wrote:

> Grrrr. Can't the CSS guys look what other specs are doing before
> making their own thing? In this case I wonder if kerning can't
> shadow font-kerning. We have similar solutions on CSS specs already.
> kerning should just get deprecated then.

Not sure what you're kvetching about here.  The CSS 'font-kerning'
property enables or disables metrics-based kerning based on kerning
data in the font.  It does not take a length value.  So the two
properties are not equivalent.

The SVG 'kerning' feature seems designed to allow
character-by-character tweaking.  One sets the 'letter-spacing' for an
entire text span and tweaks individual pairs of letters by wrapping a
span around each pair of characters and applying the appropriate relative
adjustment via 'kerning'.  My guess is that this was designed to allow
PDF-like layout where an app spits out a set of characters with
positions.

The CSS property is only designed to enable/disable font-based
kerning.  It's not designed to support character-by-character tweaking
nor do I think it should.

Cheers,

John Daggett
CSS3 Fonts editor

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2012 05:44:35 UTC