Nat McCully: Position Paper

I submit this proposal for your consideration to include in the upcoming W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation in Tokyo, Japan on September 18 and 19, 2018.

It is my understanding that one of the goals of this workshop is to encourage increased participation and investment in the W3C discussions about text layout from the Japanese publishing community, to encourage them to use HTML and CSS state of the art features and standards, and to help the W3C with future requirements and prioritization.

To that end, I think it would be useful to present a discussion of the relevance to HTML and CSS of the user requirements that the high-end print publishing industry had when I was developing several Japanese text layout and typographic features in Adobe products. I could briefly present how each feature works, the parameters that define them and reasons behind the design, and then have a discussion of how the requirements for responsive layout for the web and reading on a screen may differ from those of print publishing. If any gaps in current CSS standards were surfaced, we could discuss the best way the industry could advocate for enhancements so they have a better sense of the process and best practices. I imagine the discussion would also touch on how Western publishing entities embraced the web and success stories of how they influenced the creations of standards.

The Japanese text layout features I have in mind are:

• Line height, line leading measurements and line placement
• Character spacing and full-justification
• Jidori spacing
• Underline, overline and strikethrough placement
• Japanese oblique (shatai) transformations and glyph spacing
• drop-cap sizing and spacing
• text boundaries alignment with other elements
• Grids (for placement of elements, and for text line placement)

These are all things that may not have been fully explained from the standpoint of details of the implementations for print publishing and reasons why, and how web-based use-cases differ or are the same, or need expansion due to dynamic layout needs or for screen legibility.

My background: I joined Adobe in 1998 and was the lead engineer on InDesign for Japan until 2008, when I began working on Flash text layout for the Web and for digital publishing. I consulted with teams across Adobe on CJK layout requirements for all products. After InDesign and Flash, I joined the Digital Publishing Suite team and was in charge of mobile app development for that product. I have participated in F2F meetings of the CSS WG to discuss CJK layout requirements, and now manage a team of engineers working on a multi-platform framework for Creative Cloud applications, that bridges HTML/CSS/JS for the web to native UI rendering on each platform. 


Nat McCully
Sr. Engineering Mgr
Adobe Systems, Inc.