Open r12a opened 4 years ago
Yes, this is common practice. Attached are portions of a printed Tamil newspaper in Malaysia (Tamil Malar) that shows the same practice.
Thanks, Muthu. There are some interesting differences in your scan from the one i posted earlier – particularly in the bottom example. Though nothing surprising.
These are workarounds applied to overcome the absence of proper word-breaking features in the layout software. I believe in this case it is InDesign.
I added something about this to the gap analysis doc – please review. https://w3c.github.io/iip/gap-analysis/taml-gap.html#syllable_spacing
I also created an interactive test and a test script related to justification.
When only a single word fitted in a column of an edition of the Tamil Murasu newspaper, intercharacter spacing was applied to stretch the word to the width of the column. Equal spacing was applied between each glyph, regardless of whether or not it was a vowel-sign, as long as the vowel-sign glyphs were not connected with the base character. Large gaps were still tolerated, however, if only 2 short words fitted on the line. Vowel-signs that are not already slightly separated from their base are not letter-spaced. For example the i in கிராமப்புறங்கலில். Ligated forms are also not separated.
See https://github.com/w3c/type-samples/issues/76
Is this a common practise? @murasu