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

John Daggett:
> 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.

Do you think it is reasonable to use "letter-spacing: 3px; font-kerning: 
none" in place of "kerning: 3px" for SVG content?  If we are in the 
situation where we could drop "kerning" in favour of authors using a 
combination of font-kerning and letter-spacing, should we do that?  Or 
is letter-spacing something different enough from kerning adjustment 
that it should be kept separate?

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2012 05:50:10 UTC