[CREATE] Typographic feature UI/UX

[Chris Lilley]

Hello Boudewijn,

Friday, November 21, 2014, 9:20:24 AM, you wrote:

> I haven't got a clue yet (well, a bit more after your mail) about the gui
> :-) Also, what I would need to get started is a way to store the way the
> text object uses these features in a standard file format. As far as I
> know, neither ODF nor SVG can store flags that toggle the use of these
> features.

SVG itself does not, but CSS used with SVG can store some of the
properties of fonts (via font descriptors) and also the font features
that are requested for particular runs of text (via selectors which
match elements and then style rules setting properties on all elements
matched).

See
4. Font Resources (for the descriptors)
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-fonts/#font-resources

and

6. Font Feature Properties (for the properties)
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-fonts/#font-rend-props

On the principle of making the common stuff easy and the uncommon
stuff at least possible, the commonly used opentype features have
understandable names like font-variant-numeric (to select lining or
old style numerals) and font-variant-alternates (for stylistic
alternates).

For the uncommon or special-use stuff there is the
font-feature-settings property which is much more low level and more
closely tied to particular opentype table names.

6.12 Low-level font feature settings control: the
     font-feature-settings property
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-fonts/#font-feature-settings-prop

Of course, just because the syntax is a bit opaque there doesn't mean
that a nice UI can't expose things in a more intuitive manner.

Also, I'm not necessarily suggesting that this syntax be used to store
this info inside applications; i'm just responding to what SVG does
(particularly since this is at early implementation stage and also is
not directly in the SVG spec, instead its a CSS module normatively
referenced by SVG). Still, maybe its helpful to see what the Web does
on that aspect.

-- 
Best regards,
 Chris Lilley, Technical Director, W3C Interaction Domain