Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-inline-3] initial-letters; feedback from implementation (#4171)

About 5 years ago I made this use case:

"On the 'initial-letter' property, I have previously made the case of
wishing to give the flavour of journeyman letterpress printing, in which
'suboptimal alignment' may actually be a desired effect.

I imagined few printers had type founts that exactly spanned the height
of two-lines-of-text-plus-one-thickness-of-leading. So for two lines of
10-on-12pt text the ideal would be somewhere around 22pt, but the
printer would only have had 18 and 24pt founts to chose the drop cap
from. The 18pt character would have the same baseline as the second line
of text, so its cap height would be below the cap height of the first line.

This case would appear to be approximated to by, for example
'initial-letter: 2.75 3'. I suggest this possibility would be made more
evident
if in one of the examples a non-integer <number> were employed for the
first argument.

Section 2.5 shows the calculation for an aligned drop initial (i.e. with
equal size and sink). What would be the calculation when the arguments
are not equal?

If 'initial letter' could additionally take some more direct sizing
argument, such as a percentage of the surrounding text size, the case
would be better met and the "tricky" sizing calculation could in that
instance be avoided."

An example showing this was added, in the current draft this is shown as the third case in Example 5 'initial-letters: 2.51 3'.

The problem is that I got the initial request wrong. Our putative printer would have packed the initiall letters so that the tops of the type were aligned, not the baselines.

Is it too late tyo fix this error?    

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Received on Monday, 24 February 2020 20:33:27 UTC