Re: i18n-ISSUE-401: Clarify initial letter requirements and alignment points

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 2:08 AM, John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com> wrote:

 The BASE table specification also gives examples of a 'hanging baseline'
> setting for Devanagari script, but I've yet to see this implemented in
> either fonts or software, and I believe it is based on a mistaken notion.
>

I'm very glad to hear you say that, because it's been bothering me for a
long time.

The BASE 'hanging baseline' idea seems to be based on the assumption that
when you have multiple point sizes of Devanagari on the same line, then the
normal alignment is to align the head-lines.  Based on the very small
amount of Devanagari I've seen, this assumption does not appear to be true.
It would be very interesting to get a more authoritative answer on this.

On typographic first principles, head-line alignment doesn't seem a very
plausible default.  The most common case for default alignment of multiple
sizes is when a paragraph starts with one or more characters in a larger
size, which are not dropped. If you use head-line alignment for this, then
the spacing between the first and second lines of the paragraph would need
to be larger than between other lines, which would look ugly.  The examples
of this in Devanagari that I've seen indeed use baseline alignment (same
position as the Latin baseline) and thus preserve even baseline spacing
throughout each paragraph.

James