Thomas Zander <> wrote on 06/05/2008
11:56:45 AM:
> Hello TC,
>
> In ODF the letter spacing attribute specifies the amount of space
between
> letters. This is the way that XSL does things and this is fine for
things
> like webpages.
> Unfortunately for DTP applications this is not really what is expected.
The
> spacing between characters in DTP is not a static value, it is a percentage
> value. Basically when you have an 'm' the spacing adjustment
is wider than
> when you have an 'i'.
> In KOffice we intend to use the percentage based letter spacing
> adjustment and
> we were surprised reading the spec (and trying out OOo) that this
is not
> possible. Would it be possible to adjust the spec to also allow
percentage
> based values?
>
> Which would add the <ref name="percent"/> and we end
up with the following;
>
> <define name="style-text-properties-attlist" combine="interleave">
> <optional>
> <attribute name="fo:letter-spacing">
> <choice>
> <ref name="length"/>
> <value>normal</value>
> <ref name="percent"/>
> </choice>
> </attribute>
> </optional>
> </define>
>
I wonder if you already have the ability to do this
with length? Specifically, if I set length to be 0.5em, does this
really mean that exactly 0.5em is added after every character? Or
does it mean that a nominal 0.5em is added, but the actual space applied
is kerned according to typeface-specific ratios?
In other words, don't we have a model where we specify
nominal spacing in the markup and then kerning occurs as an implementation-dependent
algorithm?
-Rob
