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Originally Posted by frabjous
But you're telling it to use a different character spacing than usual, as a function of its normal character spacing ("tight", "loose", etc., throughout this span)-- you're not actually doing real kerning there, where information taken from the fonts is used pairwise to correctly place each pair of characters appropriately spaced apart given their individual shapes -- that would still have to be done by the rendering system, no? (Or it would be a real pain.)
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Well, kerning, 'real' or otherwise, can be done manually or automatically. In most cases it's incorporated into the font through the kerning tables, though there are some fonts which deliberately eschew that. There are certainly times when you'd want to override automatic kerning to maintain a consistent balance in a headline, but yeah, manually kerning an entire body of text would require a degree of mania.
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P.S. I looked at the CSS file inside the ePub. I was surprised by what I saw, which is controlling spacing using margin-left and margin-right -- surely the letter-spacing CSS property would be more appropriate, with just one <span> tag rather than a separate one for each letter. Doesn't the ePub spec support that? Disappointing if it doesn't.
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Pity you can't hear my bitter laugh. No, letter-spacing is not a required attribute for the CSS subset specified by the IDPF, and it's not supported by ADE.
I have no idea why it's not included (a search on the
IDPF forum reveals nothing), and it's just another example of why the epub spec needs revision.
OTOH, letterspacing can be really irksome when overused, so maybe this is some subtle ploy to enforce a typographic standard
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