Re: [css-inline] Summary of drop-caps/initial-letters discussion

I'm not clear on how this computes the sizing/alignment of the dropped
letter. For example, if I have 10pt font size with 2pt gaps, then IIRC
"initial letters: 3" will make something be 34pt.  What?  Neither bounding
box nor font size will give the right alignment.

>From the few examples of Arabic I've found, it seems more common to drop
the first word rather than the first letter. OpenOffice.org drop caps
feature has a "whole word" option which handles this.  With this proposal,
the first word would have to be wrapped in an element to handle this, right?

James


On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 1:30 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>wrote:

> From the F2F whiteboard... (plus a few extra notes from me)
>
> initial-letters: normal | <integer>{1,2}
> applies to ::first-letter or the inline-level first child of a block
> container
>
>   - First integer represents the size of the letter (as N lines with N-1
> gaps)
>
>   - Second integer represents how many lines deep the letter sinks
>     into the paragraph.
>
>   - Omitted second integer defaults to copying first integer.
>
>   - Integers must be > 0.
>
>   - Glyph ink overflowing its bounding box is excludes text
>     in both dimensions.
>
>   - Be sure to handle non-alphabetic baselines correctly.
>
>   - Subsequent paragraphs starting with normal text wrap,
>     just like subsequent lines in the same paragraph.
>     If a subsequent paragraph starts with non-normal letters,
>     then it must clear the previous paragraph's dropped letters.
>
>   - Subsequent BFCs must clear any dropped letters.
>
>   - Note: text-indent and hanging-punctuation still apply to the
>     dropped text.
>
>   + Applying to a multi-word inline first-child will format all
>     the letters inside that inline.
>     If the inline wraps, it will not break the baseline table,
>     since it's sized to cover exactly N lines; this needs to be
>     specified clearly.
>
>   + Applying to an atomic inline first-child will size and
>     position the box accordingly.
>     This can be used for, e.g. SVG illuminated caps.
>
>   + CSS Inline will define how to synthesize baseline tables for
>     atomic inlines. Might also define properties to explicitly
>     specify such a baseline table.
>
> Examples:
>
>   initial-letters: 3; /* or initial-letters: 3 3; */
>   represents a drop-cap 3 lines high, 3 lines deep
>
>   initial-letters: 3 2;
>   represents a sunken cap 3 lines high, 2 lines deep
>
>   initial-letters: 3 1;
>   represents an initial cap 3 lines high, 1 line deep
>
> Credit to hober for the <integer>{1,2} syntax!
>
> ~fantasai
>
>