Right. In a lot of ways it's the same principle we're talking about on the web with using `em` units. Give users control (except in this case the layout designer is the user).
I want font designers to be able to define a basic box and baseline for their font, and I want to be able to respect that if I'm just throwing the font onto a page without thinking about it. But I also want to be able to easily override it if I'm mixing fonts, and to be able to override it without manually adjusting a bunch of margins by trial and error that are specific to that font -- margins that will then immediately break if my users sub out their own fonts again.
It's good that we have controls in CSS for stuff like line height, ligatures, character spacing. Having more of those controls would be useful, and having quick options for them that can kind of "standardize" different fonts to all act the same would be very useful.
I feel like combined with https://tonsky.me/blog/font-size/ that these comment threads are fleshed out enough to go the HTML and CSS groups for discussion, refinement, and eventual implementation.
Clear, useful, reasonable, game-changing, and able to be opt-in.
I want font designers to be able to define a basic box and baseline for their font, and I want to be able to respect that if I'm just throwing the font onto a page without thinking about it. But I also want to be able to easily override it if I'm mixing fonts, and to be able to override it without manually adjusting a bunch of margins by trial and error that are specific to that font -- margins that will then immediately break if my users sub out their own fonts again.
It's good that we have controls in CSS for stuff like line height, ligatures, character spacing. Having more of those controls would be useful, and having quick options for them that can kind of "standardize" different fonts to all act the same would be very useful.