The article Font styles & font fallback has now been published.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

The article Font styles & font fallback is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 3 November.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article Normalization in HTML and CSS was largely rewritten. It now describes the various normalization forms, and clarifies that W3C doesn’t require all content to be strictly NFC-normalized. It also warns about the dangers of blindly normalizing content to a particular normalization form (unless performing a match/sort procedure).

Translators are invited to update the translations in German, Spanish, French, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian.

The article Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text has been updated in the following ways:

1. The sections Sideways values of writing-mode and The sideways value of text-orientation have been rewritten to replace content with more up-to-date and accurate information.
2. Browser support information has been overhauled and brought up to date.
3. In-page live code has been added to show how each feature behaves in your browser.

The article Ruby Styling provides guidance for content authors on CSS features available for styling ruby text in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian. It is a companion article to Ruby Markup. It includes information about what is and isn’t currently supported in major browsers.

Translators are invited to provide translations.

Please raise any comments as github issues by clicking on the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of the article.

The article Ruby Styling is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 14 July.

The article reviews the typical usage patterns of inline annotations for Japanese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese, and provides guidance for content authors about how to use features of the CSS Ruby spec to achieve the rendering they want. It also reports on current support for those features in the 3 major browser engines. This information should also be useful for authors writing in the Traditional Mongolian orthography.

This is a companion article to Ruby Markup, which focuses on how to mark up inline annotations.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Translators are invited to provide translations.

Please raise any comments as github issues by clicking on the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of the article.

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 7 July.

The article suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article “Script direction and languages” now has the title “What languages are written with right-to-left scripts?“, and provides insights into right-to-left (RTL) script usage around the world.

In a substantial revision, previous tables have been replaced with a completely new table which lists 12 scripts and over 200 languages using RTL scripts in the modern day. While it is only possible to give a rough idea of usage, the table includes information about which countries use those languages and figures for speakers of those languages. The data is gathered from the SIL Ethnologue.

The page Getting Started with Internationalization was recently rewritten. The new version is now available in the following translations.

Arabic: الخطوات الأولى مع التدويل

Spanish: Iniciándose en la Internacionalización

French: Une introduction à l’internationalisation

Simplified Chinese: 国际化入门资源

Thanks to the translators: Najib Tounsi, Emmanuelle Gutiérrez y Restrepo, Jean-Christophe Helary, 薛富侨