A draft of a new article, Floating times is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Tuesday 20 June.

This article answers the question: What is a floating time and how do I handle floating times in my Web application?

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers.

Read the article.

On 17th March Richard Ishida gave a talk entitled

Next steps for Japanese script support

at a Japanese Electronic Publishing Association seminar in Tokyo, Japan. (The talk was delivered remotely.)

The talk describes work that has been done recently, or is currently under way at the W3C to address Japanese script requirements for the Web and for epublications, and proposes some next steps.

The talk is also available in Chinese (日文支持的下一步工作), thanks to Eric Liu.

The Internationalization and Unicode® Conference (IUC) is the annual conference of the Unicode Consortium where experts and industry leaders gather to map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas and present the latest in technologies and best practices for creation, management, and testing of global, Web, and multilingual software solutions.

The deadline for speaker submissions is Friday, 24 March, so don’t forget to send in an abstract if you want to speak at the conference.

A draft of a new article, Approaches to full justification is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Tuesday 21 March.

This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers. (For detailed information see the Typography Index.)

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on the link “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article helps content authors use CSS to create vertical text for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian. It also describes what currently works and doesn’t work in major browsers, and provides tests you can run in your own browser.

Read the article.

The I18N Working Group has published two Note documents: Requirements for Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0, and Metadata for the Multilingual Web – Usage Scenarios and Implementations. The documents describe input to the development of, and usage scenarios for, ITS 2.0. The documents are not finished, but the group reached consensus to stop work on these specifications. They are being published as Working Group Notes for archival reasons, and show the latest snapshot of the document. In comparison to the previous working drafts, these documents only contain editorial changes. Further work items in relation to ITS 2.0 are being discussed in the ITS Interest Group.

A draft of a new article, Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Wednesday 8 March.

This article aims to help content authors understand the available options and features in CSS that support vertical text.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on the link “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

Note that some links don’t work because this is in a test location. No need to report those.

Ready-made Counter Styles contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets. The content of this document was originally part of the CSS Lists and Counters specification, but is now published as a standalone document. It is expected that the document will be updated from time to time to include new counter styles.

This document points browser implementers and specification developers to information about how to support typographic features of scripts or writing systems from around the world, and also points to relevant information in specifications, to tests, and to useful articles and papers. It is not exhaustive, and will be added to constantly.

International text layout and typography index

We expect CSS specifications will point to this index in future where developers need additional information.

One of the new features in this FPWD is the addition of links to a github repository which tracks relevant discussion threads. That issue list contains pointers to threads of two kinds:

1. requests for information about how a script works
2. threads discussing implementation issues for typographic features in specs and browsers.

In the past it has been difficult to keep track of such questions, and hopefully this will help.

You can access the ‘tracker items’ by clicking on a link in the typography index (in which case you’ll see a prefiltered list specific to the section in the document), or you can go directly to the github repo. Here you can filter information by kind, by typographic feature, and by script.

The i18n WG welcomes suggestions for inclusion in the typography index, such as useful, reliable information sources and threads to track.