Typography bucket #13

jensimmons · 2021-11-10T19:52:25Z

Description
After web fonts were defined, and before variable fonts were invented, the CSS Font specification added powerful tooling for web designers & developers to use to create refined typography.

font-feature-settings is a CSS property that addresses the low-level plumbing for these ability. It has broad support across almost all browsers.
However, Authors are encouraged to never use font-feature-settings, and instead use font-variant-*.

This [font-feature-settings] property is a low-level feature designed to handle special cases where no other way to enable or access an OpenType font feature exists. Whenever possible, font-variant shorthand property or an associated longhand property, font-variant-ligatures, font-variant-caps, font-variant-east-asian, font-variant-alternates, font-variant-numeric or font-variant-position should be used.

Authors cannot currently follow this advice, because not all browser have implemented all of the font-variant-* properties. This is holding back typography on the web.

Specifically, these two need to be implemented in Chromium:

Specification
CSS Fonts Module Level 4

Tests
font-variant-* tests

Rationale
State of CSS Survey 2021 reveals requests for typography improvements.

The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:

jensimmons · 2021-11-10T21:33:19Z

If we want to add more typography things to this, we could add support for the IC unit. It's a unit important for typesetting CJK scripts. 1ic is the full width glyph in the element’s font, as represented by the “水”.

jensimmons · 2021-11-10T22:19:19Z

Also, hanging punctuation:
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#hanging-punctuation-property
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hanging-punctuation

Tests

jensimmons · 2021-11-10T22:20:29Z

Also, Initial Letter
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline/#sizing-drop-initials
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/initial-letter

jfkthame · 2021-11-11T09:56:48Z

If you're thinking of improving support (and interop) for text in CJK scripts, can I propose supporting the Segment Break Transformation rules, which have the potential to make CJK authors' lives considerably better:
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#line-break-transform

jgraham · 2021-11-11T10:02:47Z

I think it would be useful to decide which are the highest priority areas in this proposal. Including all the specs/properties mentioned seems like it would end up with something that's too broad, and runs the risk of different implementations picking different subsets to prioritise, so not improving the actual interop. Is there data we can use to help narrow the scope to the features with highest impact?

jensimmons · 2021-11-15T17:19:27Z

Tests for Segment Break Transformation

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proosal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proposal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

foolip · 2021-11-22T22:36:03Z

The Chromium bugs for font-variant-alternates and font-variant-position are here:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=716567
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1212668

@jensimmons regarding the advice to use font-variant-alternates and font-variant-position instead of font-feature-settings, do you know if it's currently possible to use font-feature-settings to achieve the desired effect?

If so, I see that usage of font-feature-settings is quite high, and I wonder if some of that is really working around lack of support for font-variant-*. That would be compelling evidence of a need. If someone can suggest things to search for in httparchive, I could give that a try.

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proposal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

gsnedders · 2021-11-29T20:01:49Z

@jensimmons regarding the advice to use font-variant-alternates and font-variant-position instead of font-feature-settings, do you know if it's currently possible to use font-feature-settings to achieve the desired effect?

it is

jensimmons · 2021-11-30T23:06:20Z

I like to withdraw the suggestion of widows & orphans. While this functionality is highly requested, I don't believe that the current spec solves the problem we designers & developers have.

Instead, I believe font-size-adjust and/or text-size-adjust would be a better addition to this bucket.

jensimmons · 2021-11-30T23:11:06Z

@foolip font-feature -* properties do accomplish the same end-results as font-variant-* properties, but Authors are not supposed to be using font-feature-*. That's a low level API which is hard to deal with in the cascade, and has a lot of obscure values. The CSSWG intended for Authors to write code using font-variant-* exclusively. However, Authors cannot do so, because of the lack of implementations. Which is holding the whole industry back.

font-feature -* is implemented, but is practically impossible to use.

font-variant -* is what people should use, but it's not implemented in enough browsers.

Interop 2022 can help with this. Let's finish these features & make Fonts 4 complete.

jensimmons · 2021-12-02T15:52:19Z

I'm hearing desire for Color Fonts as well: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#color-font-support

jgraham · 2021-12-02T16:57:01Z

So, can we clarify what the actual proposal here is? It's difficult to understand what people think forms part of the final state of this proposal, and if we don't know that it's not possible to take a stance on it (or at least not a positive stance).

gsnedders · 2021-12-02T17:01:34Z

So, concretely, I believe our proposal is:

General Typography

Support font-variant shorthand + longhands
- Spec
- Tests
Support initial-letter
- Spec
- Needs tests in WPT. (There's some token coverage, and both WebKit and Gecko have some tests in their respective repos.)
Support font-palette and @font-palette-values
- Spec
- Tests

CJK Typography

Splitting this out, mostly for the sake of clarity; this being split out shouldn't be taken as any suggestion that these should be in any way lower priority.

Support the ic unit
- Spec
- Tests
Support hanging-punctuation
- Spec
- Tests, though note there are more tests that are currently missing from automation due to the font flag making them get treated as manual tests, due to Depended upon font coverage wpt#13203.

jensimmons · 2021-12-03T17:18:52Z

Also under CJK Typography, as suggested by Mozilla:

Support Segment Break Transformation
- Spec
- Tests

achristensen07 · 2021-12-03T21:47:09Z

Along with CJK Typography, it's probably worth including CJK text encoding, particularly iso-2022-jp, gbk, and gb18030

foolip · 2021-12-06T09:09:53Z

Tests for those encodings are here:
https://wpt.fyi/results/encoding/legacy-mb-japanese/iso-2022-jp
https://wpt.fyi/results/encoding/legacy-mb-schinese/gbk
https://wpt.fyi/results/encoding/legacy-mb-schinese/gb18030

Edit: https://wpt.fyi/results/encoding?q=iso-2022-jp- too for ISO-2022-JP.

foolip · 2021-12-06T11:27:38Z

Support initial-letter

Spec

Needs tests in WPT. (There's some token coverage, and both WebKit and Gecko have some tests in their respective repos.)

I found https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/LayoutTests/fast/css-generated-content but I can't find any tests in Gecko (or Chromium) beyond what's imported from WPT.

How comprehensive are the WebKit tests, and do they match the current spec?

foolip · 2021-12-06T11:53:49Z

For Segment Break Transformation Rules, the spec has UA-defined behavior:

Then any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level.

I only looked into this feature today so my misunderstanding is surface deep, but doesn't this make most of the interesting cases UA-defined? A bunch of the tests were marked tentative in web-platform-tests/wpt#26588 due to w3c/csswg-drafts#5086, which is still open.

jfkthame · 2021-12-06T12:34:24Z

For Segment Break Transformation Rules, the spec has UA-defined behavior:

Then any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level.

I only looked into this feature today so my misunderstanding is surface deep, but doesn't this make most of the interesting cases UA-defined? A bunch of the tests were marked tentative in web-platform-tests/wpt#26588 due to w3c/csswg-drafts#5086, which is still open.

Yeah, that's unfortunate.... there used to be quite a bit more in the spec, but then details were deferred to Text-4 following the discussion in w3c/csswg-drafts#5086 (comment).

So I guess we'd need to push that spec work forward if any real progress is going to happen here.

(FWIW, I think Gecko implemented something close to what used to be in the Text-3 draft up until a year ago, though there may have been some edge cases where it didn't entirely conform.)

foolip · 2021-12-06T13:38:47Z

I see. w3c/csswg-drafts@b3bb0ed seems to be the commit that commented out the rules around this.

foolip · 2021-12-16T23:15:20Z

@gsnedders said on the Matrix channel:

https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&product=chrome&product=firefox&product=safari&aligned&q=legacy-mb%20or%20iso-2022-jp-%20or%20ic-unit%20or%20font-variant is in principle vaguely what we want for what the typography issue became, but also calling that all "typography" seems a bit questionable.

I agree. Does anyone have suggestions for another name for this bucket? Or could it make sense to slot encodings under the webcompat bucket, if it has caused any broken sites? @achristensen07 WDYT?

karlcow · 2021-12-17T01:31:44Z

What about "Font Parametrization bucket"?

foolip · 2021-12-20T17:04:19Z

@karlcow https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/ doesn't really fit well under that banner either. But @annevk suggested just "text" which I think would work.

gsnedders · 2021-12-20T18:58:59Z

I've labelled them as interop-2022-text based on @annevk's suggestion, but I'm by no means wedded to that name.

foolip · 2022-01-10T14:59:31Z

Thanks @gsnedders! It would be great if someone from each browser engine team can look over interop-2022-text and comment if there are any issues.

jfkthame · 2022-01-10T15:31:22Z

The font-variant descriptor (as distinct from the font-variant property) was dropped from CSS Fonts (as noted at https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#changes-2018-09-20), which means a few of the tests currently listed are not valid. At first glance, this affects font-variant-05.xht, font-variant-06.xht, and font-variant-descriptor-01.html.

gsnedders · 2022-01-13T22:30:08Z

From the discussion earlier, @foolip was going to remove many of the tests in encoding, given most already pass. I'd added everything that followed from "including CJK text encoding", not limiting it to the parts particularly mentioned.

These are the tests which don't pass everywhere, which is 8 tests rather than 1209 tests. However, even among those 8 many of those are any.js tests, and it's unclear there's any value to running those in different environments. Do we just want to go down to these five tests?

gsnedders · 2022-01-13T23:37:45Z

web-platform-tests/wpt-metadata#2388 does duly remove the vast majority of the tests (down to six, keeping decode & encode tests for each of three encodings, despite gb18030 encode being interop already).

jensimmons · 2022-02-17T19:05:03Z

For reference, this is what we debated and decided.

Technology Considered	Decision
font-variant-alternates + font-variant-position	Include
IC unit (CJK focused)	Include
hanging punctuation (JP focused)	Exclude
Initial Letter	Exclude
Color fonts	Exclude
Segment Break Transformation rules	Exclude
CJK text encoding	Include

jensimmons added the proposal label Nov 10, 2021

jensimmons changed the title ~~Font features & variations~~ font-variant-* Nov 10, 2021

jensimmons changed the title font-variant-* font-variant-alternates + font-variant-position Nov 10, 2021

jensimmons changed the title ~~font-variant-alternates + font-variant-position~~ Typography: font-variant-alternates + font-variant-position Nov 10, 2021

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foolip mentioned this issue Nov 12, 2021

Agenda for Nov 18 meeting #24

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foolip added a commit to foolip/browser-compat-data that referenced this issue Nov 22, 2021

Link Chromium bugs for font-variant-alternates/position

2880878

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proosal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

foolip mentioned this issue Nov 22, 2021

Link Chromium bugs for font-variant-alternates/position mdn/browser-compat-data#13681

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foolip added a commit to foolip/browser-compat-data that referenced this issue Nov 22, 2021

Link Chromium bugs for font-variant-alternates/position

9375582

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proposal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

Elchi3 pushed a commit to mdn/browser-compat-data that referenced this issue Nov 23, 2021

Link Chromium bugs for font-variant-alternates/position (#13681)

dda09f5

These are in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome, and the subject of an Interop 2022 proposal: web-platform-tests/interop#13

foolip mentioned this issue Nov 29, 2021

Agenda for Dec 2 meeting #36

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foolip mentioned this issue Dec 10, 2021

Agenda for Dec 9 meeting #39

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foolip added the accepted An accepted proposal label Dec 14, 2021

jensimmons changed the title ~~Typography: font-variant-alternates + font-variant-position~~ Typography bucket Dec 16, 2021

foolip mentioned this issue Dec 16, 2021

Focus area labels #42

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foolip mentioned this issue Dec 21, 2021

Unlabel tests for some encodings not part of proposal web-platform-tests/wpt-metadata#2322

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gsnedders mentioned this issue Jan 13, 2022

Remove the majority of CJK encoding tests from interop-2022-text web-platform-tests/wpt-metadata#2388

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Naming of Focus Areas #61

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nt1m mentioned this issue Aug 21, 2022

Remove tests for font-variant @font-face descriptor #113

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Typography bucket #13

Typography bucket #13

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Typography bucket #13

Typography bucket #13

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General Typography

CJK Typography

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