Re: [office] proposal; Amend fo:letter-spacing

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Thomas Zander wrote:

> 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.

I don't think that authors of XSL-FO will agree with your statement 
about XSL-FO being for 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'.

Well I haven't seen this behaviour in any typesetting system I know. 
Letter spacing is spread evenly between letters. Otherwise, typesetting 
will look even more ugly (if we assume that letter spacing usually look 
enough ugly itself).

> 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?

I'm probably missing something, but what this percentage value should 
mean. If it is used, how is space between letters calculated?

Also please note that XSL-FO actually provides means for specifying 
letter-space in terms of range using letter-spacing.mininum="1pt" and 
letter-spacing.maximum="3pt". But to my knowledge ODF doesn't inherited 
this feature of XSL-FO.

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