[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 Friday, 23 January 2015 12:09:06 UTC