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w3c / elreq

Ethiopic Layout Requirements
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Numbers need lines above and below #121

Open r12a opened 4 years ago

r12a commented 4 years ago

Digits have lines above and below. Modern practice tends to use discreet lines associated with each characters, however older texts used a single line across the whole set of adjacent digits. See examples in the layout requirements document. This difference is likely due to technology constraints. Presumably, a continuous line could be applied using OpenType functionality, but there may be a question about whether a control should allow to switch between one style and the other.

Try the test page.

Initial results indicate that a single line is produced by Noto Sans Ethiopic and Noto Serif Ethiopic, but not by Kefa or Abyssinica SIL fonts.

There is a question as to whether this should be managed by font choice, or whether a switch should be available to users, eg. in CSS, that allows the desired approach to be applied.

In addition to the question just mentioned, a decision needs to be agreed regarding the impact of this feature for the user. For now, this is marked as basic.

r12a commented 4 years ago

The first comment in this issue contains text that will automatically appear in the Ethiopic gap-analysis document as a subsection with the same title as this issue. Any edits made to that comment will be immediately available in the document. Proposals for changes or discussion of the content can be made in comments below this point.

fantasai commented 4 years ago

My take is that this should be handled by the fonts. If at some point typographers want a choice, that should be handled with an OpenType feature that's hooked into a font-variant-numeric keyword.

It might be worth discussing with some of the Ethiopian font designers what they think, if they would like to be handling this automatically and just need to upgrade their fonts to do it, or if they think the separated style is worth preserving as well.