Intent to Prototype: Insert CJK Inter-script Spacing: the CSS `text-autospace` property

[Koji Ishii]

Contact emails

ko...@chromium.org, lin...@chromium.org

Explainer

None

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#text-autospace-property

Design docs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10G1uasooKpKjNeyr1wtLV85wFMlc_TK4-vb9LG_3Fzw/edit#bookmark=id.t5tzxbvnz8gg

Summary

Inserts small spacings to match the established typographic rules automatically. The spec currently defines one rule for Han ideographic characters and one for French. The initial implementation focuses on the Han ideographic characters rule. Text written in Han ideographic writing systems often mixes multiple scripts, usually the Han ideographic script, a Latin script, and Arabic digits. Small spacings when switching from and to non-Han ideographic scripts often help readability. This property lets browsers insert such spacings automatically. This property has several values, including values for other writing systems. The initial implementation will choose a subset of the defined values, but which subset is TBD.

Blink component

Blink>Layout>Inline

Motivation

None

Initial public proposal

None

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: Positive (https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4246#issuecomment-1397831533)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

Debuggability

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No. We plan to add tests.

Flag name on chrome://flags

Finch feature name

Non-finch justification

None

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1463890

Estimated milestones

No milestones specified

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5202578236768256

Links to previous Intent discussions

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[PhistucK]

Hopefully French is fr-FR, because fr-CA (Canadian French) has much fewer cases of adding a space character before punctuation...

☆PhistucK

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAHe_1dLULX9bM8FqXiTRg47GmvC5-cQTZ_s6yvB7OMuQe8ZAxg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Koji Ishii]

Thank you for the feedback.

For Canadian French, there is an open issue at csswg#8657, great if you can add there..

[一丝]

It's really exciting that Chrome has implemented this feature! For a long time, we have been left with the option of manually typing in spaces for mixed Chinese and English, and in some Chinese input methods, there is an option to add spaces automatically. In some Chinese input methods, there is an option to add spaces automatically. However, it requires users to manually enter spaces, and cannot realize automatic typesetting.

See also: 

Is it necessary to have spaces between Chinese characters and Latin letters when mixing Chinese and Western languages? 

https://www.zhihu.com/question/19587406/answer/12298128

[英布]

However, it is currently only an experimental feature in Chrome that needs to be manually enabled. Hopefully, it will be officially released soon for developers to use.