Re: CSS3 Text - Edit suggestions

Paul Nelson (ATC) scripsit:

> I have seen cases of ancient books where the Arabic baseline was rotated
> 180 degrees so the Arabic text hung from top of the page to the bottom.

Doubtless that is what I was thinking of.  My bad.  Of course,
horizontal scripts aren't like this: a horizontal script can validly
run from top to bottom or from bottom to top (to the annoyance
of people who interfile English and German books, for example).

> In fact, line-height is a concept of ascender + descender + leading.
> Regardless of the escapement or glyph orientation of the line the
> ascender is from the baseline to the ascent and from the baseline to the
> descent. 

My point is simply that the terms "height", "ascender", and "descender"
are biased towards horizontal layout; they suggest that the characters are
displayed in a vertical orientation.  I don't think anything can or
should be done about this.

-- 
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

Received on Tuesday, 20 February 2007 16:49:12 UTC