Would Drop Caps benefit from more flexibility regarding punctation?

[davidlee]

(LibreOffice Writer 25.8.2.2)

Could the Drop Caps aspect of paragraph style benefit from more flexibility regarding opening punctuation (usually quotation marks)?

The two “lorem ipsum” paragraphs illustrated above are identical except for the quotation marks surrounding the second: they have the same style, which requests opening letter Drop Caps.

Pretty? Or ugly? When the user requested “Drop Caps” is this likely what they wanted/expected? Or unlikely?

Here’s an example from another site (non-LIbreOffice) that I came across when looking deeper:

See end of: Drop Caps and Quotation Marks: A Workaround | Celebrating Independent Authors

Many users, I suggest, would strongly prefer this second “This looks good” result to my opening “Lorem ipsum”. Should we provide an option to allow the user to choose it? That is, rather than the DropCap simply applying to the first glyph (the quotation mark in my Lorem ipsum) it could be to the first non-punctuation glyph.

My “punctuation mark vs. real letter” distinction obviously need further refinement; perhaps this helps: ::first-letter - CSS | MDN

For this initial stage, let’s avoid the fine-detail “what exactly constitutes punctuation or letters” rabbit hole, and stick with the high-level, slightly hand-wavy principle.

In principle, can we consider something along these lines? Should I propose a feature request in the bugzilla? It would sit alongside my recent feature request Paragraph styling: capabilities for lead-in which may be somewhat related.

[ajlittoz]

I remember having filed a bug report about this unexpected behaviour in drop caps, but I can’t retrieve it instantly.

When drop cap character is not a letter or digit but some smaller shape, Writer considers the minimal rectangle enclosing the shape (the “hull”) instead of using the font bounding box. As a consequence, the shape (punctuation and others) is scaled up much more than letters to cover the number of lines.

IMO, the quotation mark above should have the size of the first line plus empty space underneath (second line). This would be more in line with traditional typography.

[davidlee]

@ajlittoz Thanks.

At this initial stage (the hard-core detail can come later!) would you agree that some users might far prefer something resembling the “This looks good” result (+/- detail), rather than the “Lorem ipsum” result?

[ajlittoz]

I fully agree with you. I stumbled on this ugly layout when turning a bullet into a drop cap. I’d like to find back my bug report.

I think not “some users” but practically “all users” would prefer the “This is good” variant.

[davidlee]

Thanks. If you find your bug report, let me know here, then I’ll take a look. Or if you want me to open a “feature request” in the bugzilla, let me know.

[ajlittoz]

At least I found the example file on my computer: BugDropCaps.odt (36.5 KB)
and the bug report is tdf#150200