Communications of the ACM
Web Developers Tackle Advanced Font Controls
Ligatures can link letters together to aid reading ease or improve text styling. Support for them is being developed within the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS standard.
Credit: Wikimedia.org
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Web formatting standard is benefiting from new font technology, which is enabling developers to increasingly use it for advanced digital publishing applications. The standard's support for the Web Open Font Format and the @font-face technology is allowing Web developers to specify downloadable fonts and use online font repositories such as TypeKit for a more polished look.
Meanwhile, Mozilla has begun working on CSS features that will permit higher-end font controls, says Mozilla developer John Daggett. He says some of the new features include support for specifying the use of small caps and typeset fraction characters, ligatures, monospaced numbers, and kearning. Daggett also says Mozilla is working to build better support for bidirectional and vertical text into CSS, which accommodates languages with characters written top to bottom or right to left.
In addition, Adobe is developing new Web publishing tools, such as a standard for adaptive layouts that allows text to flow around objects such as photos or pull-out quotations.
From CNet
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