This is to express a general wish, that the word processor be brought up to date with respect to typographic features, sucha as are present in many modern fonts, and handled by all modern font rendering software.
It's disappointing that LibreOffice (as well as its commercial competition) have *poorer* support for these features than the base operating system. That is, a basic text editor, or even a warning dialog box, have better support for font features than a big program designed to handle heavily formatted text! Basic features ============== (Background reading: search for "typographic features", "font feature registry", "layout tag registry".) Some features that really ought to be activated most of the time, in most scripts * ligatures for Latin and most alphabetic scripts * localized replacement (based on text language, region) * pair kerning * mark positioning Some of these are deactivated for no apparent reason. (Sometimes it's a bug). Finer features ============== Some features correspond to L/O features, but they aren't properly handled by the font rendering engine. For example * small caps Many fonts contain special glyphs, just for this purpose. Superior applications would first check if the font feature is available and use that, before resorting to a crude scaling. To be fair, the competition doesn't do this either--but XeTeX does (using ICU!!!). It would be *easy* for L/O to beat the competition typographically! Fancier features ================ It would be cool to provide some interface for such features as: * stylistic sets * character variants * user-chosen alternative forms * contextual alternatives * historical forms * petite caps (and other capitalization-related features) * old-style or proportional digits * fractions * swashes The new Millennium ================= While current "desktop publishing" software is stuck in the 80s typographically, web browsers are catching up to the font standards. (Especially considering that some people use desktop publishing software to generate web pages!) There are already proposals to give control of such features to web page developers. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-variant-ligatures-prop http://opentype.info/blog/2010/08/14/better-web-typography-with-opentype-features/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-font-feature-settings http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Graphics/opentype/opentype-fontbureau/index.html http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2010/09/opentype-features-come-to-the-web.html Here is an interesting chart of typographic features vs applications. http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/opentype_feature_support (OpenOffice.org isn't on the list, for good reason, I think.) (it says Word does small caps -- but it doesn't do them right) Compatibility ============= Of course there's the argument that LibreOffice should be just as bad as the competition. (As though at some point LibreOffice ever produced documents that were identical with the competition's. As though the competition displayed documents identically on different systems -- of course the real world was never this way!) But to fill a desire for cozy similarity with the competition, there is always the always the option of a compatibility flag, to excise any excellence. _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
