Nerd request: PHP + CSS + Typography
June 14th, 2010 • #code#typography#css
I’m in the process of designing a custom theme for this blog and my personal site, and I have a really weird crazy idea related to making some fun, fancy, decorative initial caps styles for my blog posts.
The kicker is, I don’t think I want to replace the actual first letter of the paragraph with my decorative initial letter, I just want to kinda repeat it, graphically. Why? Because the way I want to treat them would just be for visual interest, and it would be pretty hard to read if I didn’t repeat the first letter in normal text. Does that even count as an initial cap?
So I wouldn’t be able to simply use the CSS first-letter pseudo element. To do this, I think I’d need to have a php (or something) script extract the first letter of the post so I could repeat it, then treat the extra letter graphically through CSS. Is this technically possible, or am I crazy?
A blog full of thoughts and observations on making the web a better place, collected by Sarah Harrison.
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