When is it worth changing the strikeout or underline position or style?

Shahab Siavash
Shahab Siavash Posts: 141
edited November 2017 in Type Business
Hi,

I'm guessing never! Weirdly I've never thought about this. Yet we in Persian always have problems with the default position of underlines in fonts, because letters go below the baseline and it gets so messy. So normally in the web, people remove the underline and just apply styles like color. (a lot of Latin websites are also doing this, it is apparently more simple and clean. Although in Latin there are couple of letters below the baseline too.)

But in general if it is not a webfont, which apps or programs use the font parameters and not their own built-in settings? I think Adobe uses its own. Is there a way to override? 

For example as a fun thing, I did this with underline and strikeout, but Adobe just doesn't care.




So it is worth changing those parameters at all?


P.S: I realized yesterday that you can now use text-decoration-skip: ink for a webfont and do this (In Google Chrome), which is pretty cool :) And in Canary, it would be auto by default.



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Comments

  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    Related discussion: https://github.com/w3c/alreq/issues/86

  • Shahab Siavash
    Shahab Siavash Posts: 141
    Thanks. It's great. I wish they have talked about fonts in programs too (not web). Personally I think for web this skip-ink which I had seen before in some plugin called "Smart Underline" is the best way.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,173
    It seems to me that using skip-ink for underlining Arabic can potentially create ambiguities in reading. The significant number of descending letters in Arabic mean that some visible underline segments between descenders will be very short and confusable with vowel signs or dots, especially in more geometric styles of type.
  • Shahab Siavash
    Shahab Siavash Posts: 141
    John Hudson said:
    It seems to me that using skip-ink for underlining Arabic can potentially create ambiguities in reading. The significant number of descending letters in Arabic mean that some visible underline segments between descenders will be very short and confusable with vowel signs or dots, especially in more geometric styles of type.
    It's true. I think it should be both, I mean skip-ink and also more distance from the letters. Because if we move the line too far to make it safe it's not pretty and if we keep it at the middle, then we need to skip some parts. 

    Without the distance, yes it is very confusable. And vowels are pretty hard to solve. I didn't immediately think about vowels because you see we don't normally use them in Persian. (barely to clarify pronunciations.)

    This is an example from my site:



    And doing more distance needs browsers to use the font parameters, but I think only FireFox does that. 

    And apps also (at least in Windows) generally don't do that either.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 289
    John Hudson said:
    It seems to me that using skip-ink for underlining Arabic can potentially create ambiguities in reading. The significant number of descending letters in Arabic mean that some visible underline segments between descenders will be very short and confusable with vowel signs or dots, especially in more geometric styles of type.
    I agree, and I think the conclusion from ALREQ  discussion so far is the default for Arabic underline should be the descender line with ink skipping, this avoids the ambiguity of current ink skipping and avoid the cases of underline covering parts of the glyphs that goes even lower than font descender.

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