Table of contents

Appendices

5 Property Refinement / Resolution

During refinement the set of properties that apply to a formatting object is transformed into a set of traits that define constraints on the result of formatting. For many traits there is a one-to-one correspondence with a property; for other traits the transformation is more complex. Details on the transformation are described below.

The first step in refinement of a particular formatting object is to obtain the effective value of each property that applies to the object. Any shorthand property specified on the formatting object is expanded into the individual properties. This is further described in [shortexpan] . For any property that has not been specified on the object the inherited (see [inheritance] ) or initial value, as applicable, is used as the effective value. The second step is to transform this property set into traits.

NOTE: 

Although the refinement process is described in a series of steps, this is solely for the convenience of exposition and does not imply they must be implemented as separate steps in any conforming implementation. A conforming implementation must only achieve the same effect.