Negative Leading

[Richard W]

Does anyone know a robust method for specifying in a standard font format that lines written horizontally overlap vertically? This happens with ascenders and descenders that look like flourishes. This seems to happen naturally for real in at least Georgian and Tai Tham; I don't know whether it happens in Verdurian. The problems are that leading parameters generally cannot be negative. This seems to be derived from the observation that lines of physical lead cannot have negative thickness.

Further problems arise at the tops and bottoms of paragraphs when text is laid out.; The paragraph problem can usually be handled by adding space before and after paragraphs in the paragraph layout settings of a word processor.

Is there a good algorithm for redrawing a line of text that overlaps others

[bradrn]

Does anyone know a robust method for specifying in a standard font format that lines written horizontally overlap vertically? This happens with ascenders and descenders that look like flourishes. This seems to happen naturally for real in at least Georgian and Tai Tham; I don't know whether it happens in Verdurian. The problems are that leading parameters generally cannot be negative. This seems to be derived from the observation that lines of physical lead cannot have negative thickness.

I strongly suspect that this is an issue which must be solved in the text layout engine rather than in the font. In LaTeX or Word or InDesign or HTML/CSS I generally have to adjust the leading myself to get a nice-looking document, and none of them seem to have any problems with overlapping glyphs.

(In fact, if you look at https://bradrn.com/about.html, you’ll note a piece of Javanese text which extends below the Latin baseline. If you look at the source of that page you’ll see that I had to manually wrap it in a <span> with a larger margin — without that, it overlaps the next line.)