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w3c / afrlreq

African language enablement for the Web
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Styling initials for cursive scripts #4

Open r12a opened 4 years ago

r12a commented 4 years ago

For many languages, it is possible to find enlarged letters (sometimes plus punctuation) at the beginning of a paragraph (like drop caps in English).

There has been a discussion recently in the CSS WG about whether and how such a thing applies to text in the Arabic script. The conclusion seems to be that it is very rare, and the expected behaviour is not clear, however the CSS spec will say if such styles are applied to web pages (either intentionally, or because of a translation that didn't fix the styling), the initial letter should be an isolated form, but the second letter in the first word a medial form.

For Adlam, N'Ko, and Ajami i'm wondering:

a. is first letter styling used? Does anyone have any examples they can scan?

b. if so, what is the joining behaviour?

c. also if so, are there any special rules about positioning of the enlarged character(s)? Eg. are 'drop caps' more common than 'raised caps', are characters displayed in boxes, where are the characters aligned with the following text? etc.

thanks.

ablobenn commented 4 years ago

For Adlam a. Yes b.The joining is dropped and the letter takes the initial form where a joined font is used. received_3216775491712221

c. Drop caps preferred over raised caps.

r12a commented 4 years ago

Thanks for providing this example and information!

I wasn't 100% certain about the joining behaviour described, so i opened a dedicated issue at https://github.com/w3c/afrlreq/issues/6. @ablobenn , could you please take a look at that?