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Abstract

This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of the Adlam script on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, such as HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders.

The original version of this document was created by Richard Ishida.

Other contributors can be found in the GitHub contributors list.

The W3C needs to make sure that the needs of scripts and languages around the world are built in to technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. so that Web pages and eBooks can look and behave as people expect around the world.

This page documents difficulties that people encounter when trying to use languages written in the Adlam script on the Web.

Having identified an issue, it investigates the current status with regards to web specifications and implementations by user agents (browsers, e-readers, etc.), and attempts to prioritise the severity of the issue for web users.

A summary of this report and others can be found as part of the Language Matrix.

This document not only describes gaps, it also attempts to prioritise them in terms of the impact on the local user. The prioritisation is indicated by colour.

Key:

It is important to note that these colours do not indicate to what extent a particular feature is broken. They indicate the impact of a broken or missing feature on the content author or end user.

Basic styling is the level that would be generally accepted as sufficient for most Web pages. Advanced level support would include additional features one might expect to include in ebooks or other advanced typographic formats. There may be features of a script or language that are not supported on the Web, but that are not generally regarded as necessary (usually archaic or obscure features). In this case, the feature can be described here, but the status should be marked as OK.

The decision as to what priority level is assigned to a described gap is down to the experts doing the gap analysis. It may not always be straightforward to decide. If a given section in this document refers to more than one feature that is broken, each with different impacts on Web users, the priority for the section should be the lowest denominator.

A cell can be scored as OK if the feature in question is specified in an appropriate specification, and is supported by user agents. A specification that is in CR or later and has two implementations in 'major' browsers will count. This means that the feature may not be supported in all browsers yet. (At some point in the future we may try to distinguish, visually, whether support is available in a specification but still pending in major browsers or applications.)

See also General page layout & progression for features such as column layout, page turning direction, etc. that are affected by text direction.

In what direction does text flow along a line and across a page? (See the Bidirectional text section if the basic direction is right-to-left.) If the script uses vertically oriented text, what are the requirements? What about if you mix vertical text with scripts that are normally only horizontal? Do you need a switch to use different characters in vertical vs. horizontal text? Does the browser support short runs of horizontal text in vertical lines (tate-chu-yoko in Japanese) as expected? Is the orientation of characters and the directional ordering of characters supported as needed?

GitHub issue #11

Languages: nqo ff 2

This issue is applicable to most languages.

Vertical text may occur for special effects (the spine of a book, table column headings, etc). Typographically, it is simply horizontal text that is rotated. There is no way to do this effectively until browsers support the new CSS properties.

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

If the general inline direction is right-to-left, are there any issues when handling that? Where the inline direction of text is mixed, is this bidirectional text adequately supported? What about numbers and expressions? Do the Unicode bidi controls and HTML markup provide the support needed? Is isolation of directional runs problematic?

GitHub issue #23

Languages: nqo ff 1

This issue is applicable to all languages with RTL orthographies.

Style sheets need to add special rules for RTL styles if they are not supported by logical properties or values.

One approach is to create a second style sheet which, when pulled into an HTML page, overrides styles in the main style sheet with settings for RTL text. This approach is not ideal because it requires maintaining the styles in two separate locations, which can therefore get out of synch, and it requires explicit addition of a call to the second style sheet in every page that will support RTL text.

The :dir() pseudo-class avoids these issues by allowing the content author to include the RTL variations in the same style sheet as the others. However, it is not yet supported by all major browser engines.

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

GitHub issue #16

Languages: nqo ff 3

This issue is common to all RTL scripts.

When strings are passed around, some applications don't receive or use information about the appropriate base direction to use for those strings when they are rendered as part of a page.

This can lead to text being incorrectly aligned, and to text within a sentence or paragraph being incorrectly ordered. Some of this can be addressed by using heuristics to detect the direction first-strongly directional character in the string, but some strings can fail such heuristics.

HTML's dirname attribute, which is supposed to pass information with form data about direction of the text isn't fully interoperable across major browser engines.

This gap is now fixed. For details, see this GitHub issue.

GitHub issue #13

Languages: ff 3

Adlam text displayed in a block element with dir set to auto should be automatically right-aligned, unless the base direction is set to LTR, like this:

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 15 33 38

In WebKit the text appears as follows:

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 15 36 02

This is a serious issue, and indicates that first-strong heuristics are not being applied. Note that this was not an issue for N'Ko, Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, or Syriac text.

Interactive test, Text in languages that use RTL scripts will be automatically aligned with the right side of their container when dir is set to auto

Gecko: ✅ *Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:96.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/96.0*
Blink: ✅ *Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.71 Safari/537.36*
Webkit: ✅ Adlam used to be broken, but is now fixed (see the bug report). *Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.2 Safari/605.1.15*

Webkit

This was fixed in WebKit, so it now works as expected for all 3 major browser engines.

Priority initially set to basic because this was a serious issue for Adlam users, but now set to OK.

GitHub issue #10

Languages: nqo ff 3

This issue is common to all RTL scripts.

For support of bidirectional text in plain text, the Unicode Standard provides a number of formatting characters, which include RLI, LRI, PDI and FSI. See an explanation of how these work.

Note that the Unicode Standard recommends the use of RLI/LRI...PDI rather than the former RLE/LRE...PDF, because the newer code points directionally isolate the text they surround from that around it. This is important for producing bidirectional text. Although markup should be used most of the time in HTML pages, there are parts of an HTML document that don't support markup, such as the title element and title, alt, and other attributes. These characters can be necessary for managing inline runs of such text.

The RLI, LRI, FSI, PDI characters still don't produce the necessary behaviour in all major web browser engines.

Gecko and Blink support these characters. Webkit doesn't.

This is an issue related to Unicode support, rather than W3C specs.

html mentions that text content may contain these characters.

i18n test suite, Isolating formatting characters

Webkit (2014)

WebKit now supports the required behaviour for these formatting characters. This means that they can be used interoperably on all major web browsers.

These characters control fundamental behaviours for support of RTL scripts so priority is set as Basic.

GitHub issue #8

Languages: nqo ff 1

This issue is common to all RTL scripts.

Adoption of logical keywords such as -start and -end, rather than -left and -right needs to be completed.

For margins, padding, block size, border colour, width & style, logical keywords such as margin-inline-start or margin-block-end are widely supported by major browsers in their simplest forms (such as those just mentioned). However, logical properties are not well supported in shorthands such as margin-block or margin-inline or the margin property. The lack of support for shorthands is significant, since they are expected to have high use.

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

Do the standard fallback fonts used in browsers (eg. serif, sans-serif, cursive, etc.) match expectations? Are special font or OpenType features needed for this script that are not available?

GitHub issue #19

Languages: nqo ff 2

This issue is applicable to Adlam and N'Ko.

When text contains a punctuation mark such as an Arabic question mark, the glyph displayed should be that contained in the Adlam or N'Ko font, if it contains one.

At least one browser on desktop and mobile render the Arabic question mark (and perhaps other punctuation) using a fallback font despite the font containing the appropriate glyph.

Example in N'Ko:

Incorrect question mark glyph

This was tested with the Noto Sans NKo font. In Gecko and Blink the question mark falls back to a different font.

It may be related to a script itemization issue where Adlam or N'Ko is not properly recognized. A request was made to the Unicode Consortium to fix the Script Extensions table.

Other characters from the Arabic and Devanagari script blocks exhibit the same behaviour. For example, a danda used in Limbu, or a tatweel used in Syriac.

GitHub issue

Interactive test, If an N'Ko font contains an Arabic question mark, the glyph rendered should be from that font, and not fall back to an another font.

Gecko

The Unicode Consortium has fixed the script extensions table.

Gecko is implementing a fix.

A question mark is visible, just not in the correct font. So marking as advanced.

Does the script in question require additional user control features to support alterations to the position or shape of glyphs, for example adjusting the distance between the base text and diacritics, or changing the glyphs used in a systematic way? Do you need to be able to compose/decompose conjuncts, or show characters that are otherwise hidden, etc?

This covers ways of modifying the glyphs, such as for italicisation, bolding, oblique, etc. Do italic fonts lean in the right direction? Is synthesised italicisation problematic? Are there other problems relating to bolding or italicisation - perhaps relating to generalised assumptions of applicability?

If this script is cursive (eg. Arabic, N’Ko, Syriac, etc), are there problems or needed features related to the handling of cursive text? Do cursive links break if parts of a word are marked up or styled? Do Unicode joiner and non-joiner characters behave as expected?

GitHub issue #15

Languages: nqo ff 2

This issue is likely to apply to all cursive script text.

When text stroke effects are applied to cursive text, they wrap around the joining part of the glyphs, and interrupt the cursive flow.

This example shows the typical result for Adlam.

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 16 12 12

And a similar result for N'Ko.

Screenshot 2021-02-16 at 07 20 44

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

GitHub issue #14

Languages: nqo ff 2

This issue is likely to apply to all cursive script text.

Text in 'cursive' writing systems is joined by overlapping glyphs with the appropriate joining forms. If those glyphs are made opaque, the joins should not become apparent. For example, N'Ko should look like this:

Screenshot 2022-02-01 at 15 02 18

When opacity is applied to text, some browsers produce dark patches where the cursive glyphs overlap. Here is an example in the Adlam script.

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 15 52 10

And here is an N'Ko example.

Screenshot 2021-02-16 at 09 01 14

Gecko and Blink browsers show the unwanted overlaps. WebKit works as expected for Arabic, Devanagari, Syriac & N'Ko, but not for Adlam (Fulah), Mongolian, or Hanifi Rohingya.

Interactive test, Applying opacity to cursive text doesn't produce dark patches where glyphs overlap

I18n test suite, Text opacity
Contains similar tests for Arabic and Mongolian text, with the same results, except that WebKit browsers don't display Mongolian as cursive text, so the test is moot in that case.

Issue, Add note for text opacity applied to cursive scripts Closed.

Browser bug reports:
Gecko • Blink • WebKit

2020-07-27: css-color was updated to clarify that opacity should be applied to a whole element, not to individual letters, so that this shouldn't happen.

Marking as advanced, since this is a decorative feature.

GitHub issue #12

Languages: nqo ff 2

This issue is applicable to text in all cursive scripts.

When elements surround part of a cursive run of text, and apply styling, the results often break the cursive joins. (See the results of trying to colour individual letters in the illustration below – as expected above, unsuccessful below.)

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 14 39 11

Screenshot 2021-01-22 at 14 36 42

For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

Does your script need special text transforms that are not supported? Does your script convert letters to uppercase, capitalised and lowercase alternatives according to your typographic needs? Do you need to to convert between half-width and full-width presentation forms?

GitHub issue #21

Languages: 3

This issue is applicable to languages using the Adlam script (mainly Fula).

Adlam is a bicameral script, and browsers need to apply the uppercase and lowercase features of CSS to Adlam text.

Specs: CSS Text provides the text-transform property, with values that include uppercase and lowercase.

Tests & results: Interactive test, CSS text-transform:uppercase converts all Adlam characters to uppercase

Interactive test, CSS text-transform:lowercase converts all Adlam characters to lowercase

Gecko, Blink, and Webkit all convert the characters correctly.

Are there specific problems related to punctuation or the interaction of the text with punctuation (for example separation of punctuation from previous text, but allowing no line break between)? Are there issues related to handling of abbreviation, ellipsis, or iteration? Are there problems related to bracketing information or demarcating things such as proper nouns, etc?

Are there any issues when dealing with quotations marks, especially when nested? Should block quotes be indented or handled specially?

How are emphasis and highlighting achieved? If lines or marks are drawn alongside, over or through the text, do they need to be a special distance from the text itself? Is it important to skip characters when underlining, etc? How do things change for vertically set text?

What characters or other methods are used to indicate abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition?

The ruby spec currently specifies an initial subset of requirements for fine-tuning the typography of phonetic and semantic annotations of East Asian text, including furigana, pinyin and zhuyin fuhao systems. Is is adequate for what it sets out to do? What other controls will be needed in the future? What about other types of inline annotation, such as warichu? (For referent-type notes such as footnotes, see below.)

This is about ways of marking text (see also specific sections dedicated to quotations and inline notes/annotations). Is it possible to express emphasis or highlight content as expected? Bold, italic and under-/over-lines are not always appropriate, and some scripts have their own unique ways of doing things, that are not in the Western tradition at all. Text delimiters mark certain items or sections off from the main text, such as book names in Chinese, quotations, head markers in Tibetan, etc, and often involve the use of punctuation. Is there any behaviour that isn't well supported, such as overlines for numeric digits in Syriac? Are there issues about the positioning or use of underlines? Some aspects related to the drawing of lines alongside or through text involve local typographic considerations. Do underlines need to be broken in special ways for this script? Do you need support for additional line shapes or widths? Does the distance or position of the lines relative to the text need to vary in ways that are not achievable? Are lines correctly drawn relative to vertical text?

If the script has its own set of number digits, are there any issues in how they are used? Does the script or language use special format patterns that are problematic (eg. 12,34,000 in India)? What about date/time formats and selection - and are non-Gregorian calendars needed? Do percent signs and other symbols associated with number work correctly, and do numbers need special decorations, (like in Ethiopic or Syriac)? How about the management of personal names, addresses, etc. in web pages: are there issues?

Does the browser capture the rules about the way text in your script wraps when it hits the end of a line? Does line-breaking wrap whole 'words' at a time, or characters, or something else (such as syllables in Tibetan and Javanese)? What characters should not appear at the end or start of a line, and what should be done to prevent that?

When text in a paragraph needs to have flush lines down both sides, does it follow the rules for your script? Does the script need assistance to conform to a grid pattern? Does your script allow punctuation to hang outside the text box at the start or end of a line? Where adjustments are need to make a line flush, how is that done? Do you shrink/stretch space between words and/or letters? Are word baselines stretched, as in Arabic? What about paragraph indents, or the need for logical alignment keywords, such as start/end, rather than left/right?

Some scripts create emphasis or other effects by spacing out the words, letters or syllables in a word. Are there requirements for this script/language that are unsupported? (For justification related spacing, see below.)

Does the browser support requirements for baseline alignment between mixed scripts and in general?

The CSS Counter Styles specification describes a limited set of simple and complex styles for counters to be used in list numbering, chapter heading numbering, etc.The rules plus more counter styles (totalling around 120 for over 30 scripts) are listed in the document Ready-made Counter Styles. Do these cover your needs? Are the details correct? Are there other aspects related to counters and lists that need to be addressed?

GitHub issue #20

Languages: ff 3

Customisable counters are needed for many languages.

There is no way for users to create local counter styles that are not built in to the browser, and users also often want to tweak the counter style in some way (esp. the prefix/suffix).

For Adlam, this means that the decimal numeric list style that uses Adlam digits cannot be used for CSS-styled counters.

Priority: Adlam digits are used for counters in documents, and so should be available via CSS. Therefore, this is marked as a basic issue.

This gap is now fixed. For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.

Does the browser or ereader correctly handle special styling of the initial letter of a line or paragraph, such as for drop caps or similar? How about the size relationship between the large letter and the lines alongide? where does the large letter anchor relative to the lines alongside? is it normal to include initial quote marks in the large letter? is the large letter really a syllable? etc. Are all of these things working as expected?

Adlam Gap Analysis

Abstract

Status of This Document

1. Introduction

1.1 Contributors

1.2 About this document

1.3 Prioritization

2. Text direction

2.1 Writing mode

#11 Vertical text in spines, etc.

2.2 Bidirectional text

#23 :dir lacks wide support

#16 Need support for dirname attribute

FIXED !

#13 Webkit doesn't automatically right-align Adlam

The GAP

Tests & results

Action taken

Outcomes

Priority

#10 Support for isolating formatting characters lacking in some browsers

The Gap:

Spec status:

Tests & results:

Action taken:

Outcomes:

Priority

#8 Logical CSS keyword support needed

3. Glyph shaping & positioning

3.1 Fonts & font styles

#19 Glyphs for characters in other blocks incorrectly falling back to system font

The Gap:

Tests & results:

Action taken:

Outcomes

Priority:

3.2 Context-based shaping and positioning

3.3 Letterform slopes, weights, & italics

3.4 Cursive text

#15 Text stroke cuts joining glyphs apart

#14 Text opacity shows glyph overlap

The GAP

Tests

Action taken:

Outcomes:

Priority:

#12 Inline elements break cursive shaping

3.5 Case & other character transforms

#21 Case conversion for Adlam

4. Typographic units

4.1 Characters & encoding

4.2 Grapheme/word segmentation & selection

5. Punctuation & inline features

5.1 Phrase & section boundaries

5.2 Quotations & citations

5.3 Emphasis & highlighting

5.4 Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

5.5 Inline notes & annotations

5.6 Text decoration & other inline features

5.7 Data formats & numbers

6. Line and paragraph layout

6.1 Line breaking & hyphenation

6.2 Text alignment & justification

6.3 Text spacing

6.4 Baselines, line-height, etc

6.5 Lists, counters, etc.

#20 Adlam counter-styles are not available — FIXED !

FIXED !

6.6 Styling initials

7. Page & book layout

7.1 General page layout & progression

7.2 Grids & tables

7.3 Footnotes, endnotes, etc.

7.4 Page headers, footers, etc.

7.5 Forms & user interaction

8. Other

8.1 Culture-specific features

8.2 What else?