- From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:03:18 -0400
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>, Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com>, CSS public list <www-style@w3.org>
On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:39:13 +0200 Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote: > Hello Dave, Alan > > Abstracted from my Twitter feed, where I asked for well set examples > of initial drop letter with accent. French practice for a long time was to drop the accent. In general, though, as John Hudson and others point out, the accent should not be considered when working out the height of the letter. One reason (not mentioned by them in Chris' summary) is that a page or spread might have a mixture of accented and unaccented initial letters, and if the size of the letter is conveying importance then you would need the base letter to be the same size in all cases. This also happens with decorated (e.g. floriated) initials where there's a decorative "hat" over the letter, as in the example in my blog posting [1]. This means leaving extra space before the entire paragraph (or whatever) in some cases, and in other cases there will have to be space -- an integral number of blank lines) under the initial, e.g. for Ç. In Greek a breathing mark may be drawn to the left of an initial letter, in which case the breathing mark should be in the margin and the initial itself align; only the most careful typographers would do this in the days of metal type as hung punctuation requires inserting a thin space at the start of each line without punctuation, just as we used to in Quark Xpress. This is why the Dutch example on my blog has the large E indented after the “d’” at the start, although today most designers would surely prefer the E to be flush left with the rest of the text [2]. Hungarian, Vietnamese, Czech, Slavonic are probably better languages for examples than French, although of course French has a tradition of fine typography. Liam [1] http://barefootliam.blogspot.ca/2014/05/using-images-as-initial-drop-caps.html [2] http://barefootliam.blogspot.ca/2014/04/formatting-drop-caps-with-css.html sv. figure 5; there's also a Greek example with a decorative "hat" there. -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2014 17:03:23 UTC