[css-inline-3] Drop 'hebrew' alignment from initial-letter-align · Issue #5208 · w3c/csswg-drafts (original) (raw)

As we were drafting up initial-letter-align, we added a hebrew value to represent the correct alignment for the Hebrew script, whose top alignment point coincides with neither the x-height, nor the cap height. Numerous writing systems have this problem: their top edge has no corresponding font metric. So we also have a generic issue about supporting writing systems other than Latin, CJK, and certain Indic derivatives that use the hanging baseline; and Hebrew was a sort of specific placeholder for this problem so we could work out some of the details.

Given OpenType still doesn't have metrics for Hebrew (or Thai or a number of other writing systems), and we're tightening up the spec overall, I think it makes sense to drop this value from the spec for now but keep the examples and the generic issue open. We still need a solution for the problem, but ideally one that scales to all the writing systems as yet unsupported. In the meantime, while it's been useful to have it kicking around as we work out the system overall, I think it's time to trim the value space down to what is currently possible to implement based on existing font metrics so that the reality of the missing capability is clearer.