Category: jlreq

Chinese and Japanese have a native way of indicating emphasis for short ranges of inline text which involves placing a small mark above or below the characters being emphasised in horizontal text, and to the right/left in vertical text.

This is now supported, using CSS, in all 3 major browser engines.

See the Gap report.

See also CSS Text Decoration for how to use this feature.

All 3 major browser engines now support the ability to create custom counter styles.

This is a significant step forward in enabling fully interoperable list numbering and other counters that reflect local approaches, especially for languages with smaller speaker populations.

See the Gap report.

See also Ready-made Counter Styles to use or adapt almost 200 suggested patterns from around the world.

By default, in runs of Latin alphanumeric text the letters are rotated 90º and run down the page. However, in some instances the alphanumerics need to stand upright. For example, this is important for acronyms.

This is now supported, using CSS, in all 3 major browser engines.

See the Gap report.

The Ready-made Counter Styles document provides ready-made definitions for counter styles and covers the needs of a range of cultures around the world. The code snippets provided in the document can be included in style declarations by simply copying and pasting, or they can be use as a starting point and modified as desired.

This update brings the total number of style templates to 177, covering 44 writing systems.

Substantial changes were also made to the styling and presentation. Each template is now accompanied by a set of examples, as well as an icon that copies the template to your clipboard in a single click. Another icon points to MDN’s roundup of browser support for named styles. Extensions to cover affix variants are now expressed in terms of the extends syntax.

Fixes were applied for tai-lue and warang-citi styles.

Finally, a button is provided to allow you to turn off all counter styling for the examples. That then allows you to see which styles have built-in support in the browser you are using.

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 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 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.)