Wrapping Around Initial Letters

Introduction

At the Sydney F2F we resolved to add full kerning around initial letters. I’ve attempted to describe a procedure for doing so.

1. Initial Letter Wrapping

should this all be defined in terms of shape-outside instead?

none

No wrapping is performed.

auto

For each line of text impacted by the initial letter, the line box adjacent to the intial letter starts at the left-most point that touches the ink of the initial letter, plus a fixed amount of offset.

How much offset? Based on the right side-bearing of the initial letter? That could be a problem as it’s sometimes negative (see Zapfino).

first-line

As auto, but wrapping only performed on the first line of the block containing the initial letter.

Rewrite for logical directions.

Bikeshed value names.

Do we need anything else for scripts where this behavior is undesirable? Or is default "none" sufficient?

Note: If the next character after the initial letter is a whitespace character, auto and first-line compute to none, in order to avoid the initial letter appearing to be part of the subsequent word.

p::first-letter {
  initial-letter: 3;
  initial-letter-wrap: none;
}

p::first-letter {
  initial-letter: 3;
  initial-letter-wrap: auto;
}

p::first-letter {
  initial-letter: 3;
  initial-letter-wrap: first-line;
}

What should happen with initial letters that are concave on the (right) side? Wrapping the middle line in a three-line initial "K" can look very strange.