Karl Stolley

Ethan Wang, announcing a new CSS specification sponsored by Microsoft Design:

Leading-trim works by browsers accessing the font metrics to find, for example, the cap height and baseline. As the standard font format, OpenType specifies what metrics to include in the font file. OpenType has been jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe as an extension of Apple’s TrueType font format since 1997. While today OpenType has robust support for Latin scripts and CJK languages, it still lacks key metrics for other less commonly used writing systems such as Hebrew or Thai. As people adopt leading-trim, we hope this leads the way for us to add more font metrics of other writing systems to OpenType.

It’s hard to overstate how important this property, leading-trim (pron. ledding), will be to typesetting with CSS. Since the very first specification, line-height has had some very troubling behavior under certain circumstances. That leading-trim is set to access the metrics of individual fonts also suggests that more font-aware CSS properties and rendering could be on the horizon.