Spaces vs. kerning for laying out quotes and symbols?

[jackwoe]

Hi all,

I've read some threads here about using the various spaces in unicode to layout quotes and nested quotes in various languages.

Is that better and more supported than editing the kerning in a typeface and embed it with @font-face in the CSS?

[Jellby]

I prefer kerning, but not embedding the font.

Do not alter the book text adding specific spacing that will look nice in this or that font on this or that reader, but rather rely on the device's font rendering to do the right thing. Sure most devices will have a crappy font with no proper kerning, but that's not the book's fault. Personally, I edit my preferred font to fix kernings and upload it to my device, so I can use it for every book (without embedding).

[jackwoe]

I was actually thinking of the French spacing for punctuation.

Unfortunately, I was unable to showcase language sensitive kerning. I don't know if I simply did it wrong, or if neither Firefox nor my ereader support it.

The idea was to embed a font with a negative kerning between   and ! and other punctuation for the French spacing rules, sensitive only when xml:lang="fr" is in effect.

But that's something I'll come back to later I suppose.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by jackwoe

I was actually thinking of the French spacing for punctuation.

Oh, that... what a nightmare
In this case I'm more pragmatic and add thin non-breaking spaces where needed.

The idea was to embed a font with a negative kerning between   and ! and other punctuation for the French spacing rules, sensitive only when xml:lang="fr" is in effect.

You can use language selectors in CSS and in ePub... but Adobe will ignore them. With OpenType you could add different set of rules (kernings, ligatures, etc.) to the font, and switch one or the other through CSS, at least in theory, I doubt support for this is quite extended. But anyway, that would require you to embed a font for the text, which is something you should think again several times before doing.

[DaleDe]

The easiest method to get a narrow space is to shrink the font size for nbsp to the value you want using a span. All the other methods will be more complicated and less likely to work.