7 ms·

> The solution > - Specify cap height, not em square size. > - Specify it in pixels. Specify cap height, really? How does that work for Arabic or Tibetan o

• skrebbel 6y ago
  Oh come on, this entire article is obviously about Latin typography. Other scripts are simply out of scope. You'll find that nearly all typography articles focus on a single script they way. Often that's Latin because of its widespread use in the west, but not always. There's no racism here. Articles about pizza aren't dismissive of kebab.
  • kps 6y ago
    For Latin, x-height is much more important than cap height, in particular for selecting compatible sets of fonts.
  • akersten 6y ago
    > . Other scripts are simply out of scope. Luckily, the font engine developers for popular operating systems did not scope those issues out just because they were inconvenient for designers who falsely assume that "16" should mean an arbitrary part of a letter in a font is always 16 pixels high. > There's no racism here. No one said there was until you brought it up?
  • jfk13 6y ago
    Nobody said anything about racism. Yes, the article was obviously focused on Latin typography, but it was calling for a user interface change that would affect everyone using the affected software, no matter what language they speak/write.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    So basically: "This car is only for driving in sunny weather on a perfectly smooth surface. It doesn't have lights, tyres, suspention or heating because traction, snow, rain, road bumps and darkness are out of scope."
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • jeroenhd 6y ago
    > Oh come on, this entire article is obviously about Latin typography. Other scripts are simply out of scope. The author proposes reworking either the way operating systems and browsers handle font rendering and scaling, or the way fonts are designed. Other scripts are very much in scope.
• insert_coin 6y ago
  and em works in arabic and mongolian?
  • bsza 6y ago
    Tibetan doesn't even have a letter m.
    • dylan604 6y ago
      What are M&Ms called in Tibet?
      • rhabarba 6y ago
        I would meditate over this question, but there is no Om.
        • jfk13 6y ago
          ༀ is U+0F00 TIBETAN SYLLABLE OM.
      • amelius 6y ago
        □&□s
        • dylan604 6y ago
          Cute, but I was halfway expecting something like M&Ms are M&Ms regardless for the response. M&Ms are still M&Ms even if local language doesn't have an 'M' in their alphabet/language. Just don't ask me how they'd type it out in an email requesting more □&□s
• anticristi 6y ago
  Forget "foreign" scripts. More pressing is the concern of properly sizing emoticons, so they don't look odd when mixed with Latin. I'm sometimes wondering what problems collective human intelligence had solved, had we stopped short of encoding emoticons in Unicode.
  • iainmerrick 6y ago
    Sorry to be pedantic, but I think you mean “emoji”. “Emoticons” are the ones built out of letterforms, like “:)”
    • rhabarba 6y ago
      Technically, emojis are built out of UTF-16 letterforms.
      • samatman 6y ago
        That is an impressive amount of technical incorrectness to fit into one short sentence asserting technical correctness!
• mitchdoogle 6y ago
  OK. Well let's come up with a solution that takes into consideration these other systems. Instead of getting angry that someone was ignorant of other languages, help them understand a way their ideas could be adjusted to be more inclusive.
  • jfk13 6y ago
    Who's angry? I just pointed out that the proposed "solution" has some shortcomings that didn't appear to have been considered at all. OK, a more inclusive solution: how about sizing fonts based on a coordinate space within which the font designer is free to draw the glyphs using as much or as little of the space as they consider appropriate for a given character. (They can even draw beyond the nominal "bounds" of the sized coordinate space, e.g. for long tails or flourishes.) We could call it... oh, let's see... maybe the "em square".
    • yoz-y 6y ago
      That doesn’t solve the need of: “I have two different fonts and want to display them having the same size”. And also “I want to center a piece of text inside a box”. Both of which are basically impossible these days without special casing for each font.
      • jfk13 6y ago
        "I ... want to display them having the same size" is too vague to be useful. Do you mean having the same x-height (the main body of the lowercase letters, assuming Latin script)? Or the same cap-height? Or the same ascender height? Or the same descender depth? Or the same character widths? Or a similar overall amount of "ink" in each character? Yes, it's impossible without special-casing for each font, because there is no clear basis for making such an equivalence, given how designs differ.
        • yoz-y 6y ago
          The general case would be to have text written in the same paragraph align well. To me that encompasses same baseline, same x height, and in the case of mixing scripts same cap height (in case of CJK). Basically “do what I mean”. I understand that it’s hard, but it should be at least doable. If it would require being able to specify which height to consider, so be it, make it an option.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  > so many writing systems where "cap height" is meaningless Can you name any writing system that doesn't have a logical equivalent? If you pull up all your examples, a quick eyeballing of them reveals there is a clear upper and lower (or left and right in the case of vertical scripts) "line" that is the obvious equivalent to cap height, even if ascenders or descenders sometimes go over it. If you don't want to call it "cap height" in favor of a more inclusive term then you're welcome to suggest one, but the idea is generally applicable. It's not ignoring other scripts. > Specify it in pixels? This is a solved problem, the author presumably meant logical pixels (e.g. as used in CSS), not display pixels. Logical pixels map to display pixels either 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, etc. or by a non-integer ratio when other browser or OS zoom settings are used.
  • jfk13 6y ago
    Do you really see a clear cap-height (and baseline, to measure it from) here? https://software.sil.org/awami/design/ https://software.sil.org/awami/design/ Or look at Thai: https://omniglot.com/writing/thai.htm https://omniglot.com/writing/thai.htm. Yes, there's a pretty clear upper and lower "line", but it's much more like an equivalent to ex-height in Latin than to cap-height. Giving it a different name doesn't help: if you put Latin text with 16px cap-height alongside Thai text with the "body" of the letters sized to 16px, they'll look awful (the Thai will be much too big). (As someone else has already said, ex-height is usually a more useful measure for Latin script, and that would be closer to matching how something like Thai might be measured -- though it'd be a bit on the small side. And it wouldn't interoperate well with Chinese, for example.)
    • crazygringo 6y ago
      > Do you really see a clear cap-height (and baseline, to measure it from) here? I absolutely do. Do you... not? You can do a quick web search for "Arabic type anatomy" that will make it crystal clear for you. I mean it obviously has nothing to do with "capital" letters (so a more inclusive term would be better, probably), but there are clear upper and lower "bounds" beyond which ascenders/descenders poke out. The relative sizing of fonts (and line heights) across languages is a separate issue, and is complex. But it's a disaster in interfaces today, where e.g. traditional Chinese characters sized to cap height become virtually illegible they're so small.
• johncolanduoni 6y ago
  The author seems to be using the web notion of CSS pixels (which take PPI into account) without qualifying it. This is understandably pretty confusing to anyone who has used pixels in, well, any other context.