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Message-ID:  <142F6D60-2BFD-4CF9-9B5C-EFD7FFBED00C@frycomm.com>
Date:         Fri, 1 Dec 2006 11:22:44 -0500
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Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
From: William Adams <will.adams@FRYCOMM.COM>
Subject: Re: The Next Font Selection Scheme
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <E85BA455AFD3EE488C8BC5CCF98DD41788C8B5@EPPING-EVS1.open.ac.uk>
Precedence: list
Status: R

On Dec 1, 2006, at 10:24 AM, J.Fine wrote:

> In web pages, CSS is commonly used for 'font selection'
> and if required the endcoding can be Unicode.

> I'd find it helpful to know to what degree CSS and
> Unicode would solve font selection problems for
> printed pages.

Well, Unicode as implemented in XeTeX (and other TeX-variants) is  
solved for most problems.

CSS font selection is pretty primitive --- the only thing it adds  
AFAICT would be ``Generic font families'' (which map nicely to  
<foo>default) adding ``cursive'' and ``fantasy''.

> Excluding mathematics, of course.  That has its
> own issues.
>
> I'm expecting a relatively short list of things
> that can't be done, or done only with difficulty.

Things which CSS font selection doesn't encompass:

width
optical size (as opposed to physical --- I left this out of my list)
font features such as swash and contextual ligatures
numberstyles

They do have a nice numbering scheme for weight though (100--900)  
which could be adapted --- there's no reason this couldn't be a  
superset of CSS --- that's a very good idea and also use the  
numbering scheme for widths.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications


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