Re: [css-inline] Summary of drop-caps/initial-letters discussion

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 4:14 PM, James Clark <jjc@jclark.com> wrote:

> I'm not clear on how this computes the sizing/alignment of the dropped
> letter. For example, if I have 10pt font size with 2pt gaps, then IIRC
> "initial letters: 3" will make something be 34pt.  What?  Neither bounding
> box nor font size will give the right alignment.
>

The letter needs to extend from the baseline of the third line of text to
the top of the cap-height of the first line. So the height of the initial
letter is 12pt + 12pt + Cap Height of 10pt letter. If the cap-height is 70%
of the font size, then the initial letter is ~31pt high, which would mean a
font size of ~44pt.

It does depend greatly on the particular font metrics.


>
> From the few examples of Arabic I've found, it seems more common to drop
> the first word rather than the first letter. OpenOffice.org drop caps
> feature has a "whole word" option which handles this.  With this proposal,
> the first word would have to be wrapped in an element to handle this, right?
>

Correct. I wonder if there's interest in a ::first-word pseudo-element. The
books we publish often set the first three words of each chapter in all
caps; ::first-n-word(3) would be nice ;)

Regards,

Dave