Re: [css-inline] i18n-ISSUE-408: Boxed characters and initial letter properties

I'm wondering whether something along the lines of line-height, internal 
to the intial letter box, could help simplify setting of the necessary 
space.

ri


On 11/02/2015 10:40, Arle Lommel wrote:
> I rather suspect there is no way you will avoid this problem
> systematically. I have seen systems that have set sizing based on the
> characters’ physical bounds (rather than the bounding box), and that
> tends to mess things up even more. (A build of the open-source Lilypond
> software for typesetting music had, at one point, a system for setting
> lyrics that set spacing based on the physical height of the text lines,
> so lines with no descenders were set too close to following lines. The
> results were ugly, to put it mildly.)
>
> In this case what is clearly going on is that CSS is considering the
> bounding boxes of the characters as defined in the fonts. Since the
> diacritics sit outside the bounding box for the base character, the CSS
> model ignores them (which is what you want for /most/ typographical
> purposes).
>
> If you want to make a systematic fix you'd need a setting that tells the
> rendering engine to ignore the bounding box and instead consider the
> physical position of all character elements. That would require
> rewriting the rendering engine to support this use case. That is, of
> course, a non-trivial task.
>
> -Arle
>
> Sic scripsit *Richard Ishida * ad *Florian Rivoal * die Tue Feb 10 2015
> 17:29:28:
>> What concerned me was that the combining characters leaked outside the
>> box.  I think that one could add enough padding to avoid this, but it
>> is a messy job for an author, and may require different settings for
>> each initial-letter (not all have combining characters).  With my
>>  author hat on, i'd just want to say 'make it all fit', and have
>> combining character accounted for too. I think we'd need to fix that.
>>
>> Note also that there is a gap in the English example where the beard
>> of the type is empty (because there's no descender).
>

Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2015 16:05:46 UTC