Re: [office] Unicode relative spaces -- Was, proposal for new position and space attributes for the list level

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

On 2/23/07, Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@sun.com> wrote:
> Hi Marbux
>
> Thanks for the clarification.
>
> I played around a bit with emspaces inserted into the text-content of an
> ODF file in OpenOffice.org and it seemed to work well. So the default
> font-face that I used obviously had the proper metrics and such.

Duh! [Smacks himself in the head.] You made me realize that my thought
that fonts don't support the em-based spaces was based on my
WordPerfect experience, where Unicode isn't supported in the WPD and
WPT file formats. Sorry for that bit of misinformation and thank you
for setting me right.

[more]

> With reference-size, I meant the actual point-size with which the
> em-space gets rendered when the document is viewed. This is obvious in
> some parts of documents like paragraph. So if there was a feature to
> specify the leading indent of a paragraph in em-spaces, the actual size
> of the space would result from the font-size attribute of the
> paragraph-style.
>
> For other parts of a document, this is more difficult. For instance page
> margins - There is not normally a font-size associated with a page.
> Paragraph styles are associated with master-page styles which are linked
> to page-layouts, but not the other way round (see sect. 2.8, 14.3 and 14.4).
>
Agreed. Some things like page margins need to be absolute
measurements. We have centimeters and inches for that kind of thing.
But if it were necessary to implementing the em-based system of
measurements, margins might be expressed in an application internally
in an arbitrary em size such as 12-point ems, which correspond to the
typographical pica measurement system.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_%28unit_of_measure%29>.

> I can see how em-based horizontal measurements can be useful in text
> documents. However, just calling to allow them wherever cm, in, pt etc.
> are allowed is not feasible. From reading your clarifications I can see
> that you don't want to do this.
>
You have me figured out. :-)  I'm after accessibility and
compatibility with other standards like CSS and XSL:FO, not a side
trip to 16th Century technology. Em-based measurements should only be
implemented where they make sense.

Best regards,

Marbux