@duncan I’ve just received an email advertising the impending release of Sparkle 4.
I’ve recently bumped up against some typographic problems in a project and wondered if some of those might be addressed in Sparkle 4. And more broadly, I wonder what additional typographic control might be incorporated into Sparkel 4.
I understand that HTML & CSS standards may not be able to address some of these problems, but let me present them in the case that there might be a solution.
ISSUE #1 – Lack of Character Styles
We know that Sparkle enables the definition of paragraph styles. Often, however, I will want to apply a local style to a character, word or phrase within a paragraph. Presently, I can select the character or phrase and manually apply text attribute overrides, but it would be nice to be able to save these local overrides as character styles that would be synchronized site wide. Is it possible to add a Character Style feature to Sparkle 4?
ISSUE #2 – Inability to Align 2 Lines of Text to a Common Baseline
I recently had the need to align two different strings of text along a common baseline. One string was set in DIN at 40px, and the other was set in Georgia at 28 px. Although I had visually aligned the two strings along a common baseline on the Sparkle canvas, they appeared unaligned in the HTML preview and output. The smaller text appeared to float higher. This was true no matter how I sized the respective text frames or how I aligned them. The “space before” paragraph attribute has no effect on a first line.
In the end, my hack was to set the two lines as one line within a single text frame, and applied the text styling overrides to the second phrase. However, my question is whether or not it would be possible in Sparkle 4 to be able to align two separate strings of text along a common baseline.
ISSUE #3 – Inability to Vertically Align Text within a Text Frame
I’ve also occasionally wished that I could vertically align text within a text frame (top, center, bottom). Is this a feature that will appear in Sparkle 4?
ISSUE #4 – Inability to Apply a Baseline shift to Characters
Admittedly this is a finer point of typography, but there are occasions where I would like to adjust the height of a character with a baseline shift. For example, parentheses are designed to fit around upper and lowercase letters, but when you are setting all caps or a string of numbers it looks better to raise the parentheses a few points/pixels to better frame the numbers or capitals.
Would it be possible to add a baseline shift attribute to text styling panel in Sparkle 4?