w3c / w3c/afrlreq

Styling initials for cursive scripts

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i:initials l:ff l:nqo question s:adlm s:arab s:nkoo
Dominant language
HTML
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Forks
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Description

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.

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
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Research direction

Start by reading the linked CSS WG discussion, then gather examples for Adlam, N'Ko, and Ajami. Record whether first-letter styling is used, how joining behaves, and how enlarged characters are positioned; the work is done when these findings are documented clearly enough to inform web styling guidance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
css
Domain
internationalization
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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