[css-text] text-spacing is very complicated

[litherum]

text-spacing is getting very complicated now. By my count, the current grammar accepts 769 different combinations of values (770 if you count auto). It's probably worth an investigation to determine which of these combinations are actually useful.

[frivoal]

There probably are a number of unnecessary combinations in there indeed. We should get help from JLReq to figure which ones are essential.

cc: @r12a @macnmm @fantasai @MurakamiShinyu

[MurakamiShinyu]

I think that the text-spacing property is like a short hand property such as font-variant whose total number of combinations is very large and hard to reduce.

[litherum]

@dauwhe mentioned that Prince has something similar (prince-text-replace?). Perhaps he has some insight into how to better design text-spacing.

[dauwhe]

Here's the PrinceXML property in action. It finds a period followed by a space, and replaces it with a period followed by an em-space (U+2003). PDF of the result attached.

p.space {
  prince-text-replace: ". " ".\2003";
}

This has lots of problems, not least because you can't define under what context the replacements happen.

prince-text-replace.pdf