Lack of support for applying extra spacing between Japanese and Western text

[xfq]

This issue is applicable to Chinese and Japanese.

In Japanese composition, it is usually recommended to apply extra spacing between Japanese and Western text to increase the recognition of Western text.

Currently, browsers do not support this feature, so content authors have to work around the problem by adding spaces manually.

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please discuss this issue there.

[xfq]

The first comment in this issue contains text that will automatically appear in one or more gap-analysis documents as a subsection with the same title as this issue. Any edits made to that comment will be immediately available in the document. Proposals for changes or discussion of the content can be made in comments below this point.

Relevant gap analysis documents include:
Chinese • Japanese

[frivoal]

There exists a css-property to deal with that in css-text-4: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#text-spacing-property

text-spacing: ideograph-alpha ideograph-numeric

I don't believe it to be implemented anywhere yet, though.

[xfq]

@frivoal Yeah, I also mentioned it in w3c/clreq#401 (although I didn't mention ideograph-numeric). I think the current CSS spec has at least two potential issues:

• First, this spacing is currently not customizable. See 3.2.6 d: Discussions regarding the amount of inter-character spacing between Kanji and alpha numeric characters #163 for more details.
• Second, text-spacing does not currently support non-CJK languages. See the thread in Lack of support for applying extra spacing between Chinese/Japanese and Western text clreq#401 (comment)

[r12a]

Hmm. This discussion would be better held at w3c/clreq#401, since it is the issue which is being tracked by the gap pipeline. Implementers using the pipeline may not see this thread.

(Perhaps the boilerplate text should indicate where to hold discussions.)

[MurakamiShinyu]

FYI,

There exists a css-property to deal with that in css-text-4: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#text-spacing-property

text-spacing: ideograph-alpha ideograph-numeric

I don't believe it to be implemented anywhere yet, though.

text-spacing: ideograph-alpha ideograph-numeric is being implemented in Vivliostyle very recently.

• Support CSS text-spacing and hanging-punctuation properties vivliostyle/vivliostyle.js#814