RE: [css-inline] i18n-ISSUE-408: Boxed characters and initial letter properties

Since all examples come from flickr, I am not sure that they convincingly reflect a common usage. At least for Hebrew, such boxed characters are quite unusual in modern documents.
--
Shalom (Regards),  Mati


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org] 
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2015 2:09 PM
To: www-style@w3.org; www International
Subject: [css-inline] i18n-ISSUE-408: Boxed characters and initial letter properties

2.4. Alignment of Initial Letters: the initial-letter-align property http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-inline/#aligning-initial-letter

Looking at the examples at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/sets/72157650248400402/ I noted that another apparently popular approach to initial letter highlighting involves centring the text in a decorated box. Here are some examples:

Hebrew
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/15650929903/in/set-72157650248400402
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16084956857/in/set-72157650248400402/

Chinese
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/15650930393/in/set-72157650248400402

Korean
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16246010056/in/set-72157650248400402
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16086075057/in/set-72157650248400402/

Devanagari
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/15652027313/in/set-72157650248400402
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16084553210/in/set-72157650248400402/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16084392688/in/set-72157650248400402/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/16084553630/in/set-72157650248400402/
and others


It seems logical to assume that one might use the ::first-letter plus initial-letter property to indicate the vertical height of such a box, and the general displacement relative to the first line.  The current values of initial-letter-align, however, don't seem relevant - the enlarged character(s) in the above example appear to be centred vertically and horizontally within the box, and it is the box that is aligned with the rest of the text. Do we need a 5th value for the initial-letter-align property that centres the sequence of characters in a box who's size is indicated by the initial-letter property (ie. rather than aligning by baselines), and that indicates the alignment of the top and bottom of the box relative to the follow-on text?

(This comment has been reviewed by the i18n WG.)

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2015 19:48:35 UTC