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

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 9:47 AM, John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com> wrote:

> James Clark wrote:
>
>  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.
>>
>
> This is one of those questions that can't be reliably answered by looking
> at what people have produced without taking into consideration the nature
> and possible limitations of the technology they used to produce it.


Completely agreed.

 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.
>>
>
> I'd say the general case of default alignment is when two or more
> different fonts and/or different sizes of font are used together on a line,
> of which what you describe is a rather specialised case. Now if we also
> considers what should happen with alignment when e.g. two different
> Devanagari fonts are used on the same line and also with a Latin font in
> the mix, then it seems to me we're getting into something like bidi
> territory: trying to parse which font is leading the alignment and how the
> others are meant to follow.
>

Are you saying that if the Devanagari font is "leading", then the head-line
of a Devanagari font of another size on the same line should be aligned to
the head-line of the leading font?

James