Re: [css3-fonts] ordinals vs. superiors

On 08/29/2013 07:30 PM, John Hudson wrote:
>
> Ordinals are so called because they are used in abbreviations of
> ranked numbers in ordinal sets.
>
> PS. This means that it should be possible to apply the <ordn> feature
> to character sequences such as
>      2a 8o 12th
> and affect substitution only of the letters, leaving the numerals full size.
>
> For this reason, I believe it might be a mistake to put ordinals
> and superscripts in the same property, as the <sups> feature
> would be expected to affect both numerals and letters.

If that's actually the case, then yes, it belongs in font-variant-numeric,
and, ideally, the OpenType spec should be clarified to explain that usage.

---

That still leaves the problem of Mlle...

John Hudson wrote:
> On 29/08/13 5:16 PM, fantasai wrote:
>
>> Also, just remembered -- in French ordinals are used for abbreviations
>> like Mme, which has nothing to do with numbers at all.
>
> I would say that usage is just superscript letters, not an ordinal.

It seems wrong to me if Mlle is typeset with superscripts that rise above
the cap height line. Which is what 'font-variant-position: superscript' is,
I believe, expected to do (because otherwise it would be wrong for the
semantic-superscript cases that it's designed for).

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_letter which has awful
typesetting, but describes a bunch of cases that require similarly-
formatted letters...

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 30 August 2013 20:57:37 UTC