Views from the Choir Loft

Drop Caps : the CSS Way

Veronica Brandt · October 3, 2019

A NICE paragraph to start the experiment. Can we access stylistic alternates with CSS here? The drop cap only spans two lines. Think of other things to type. Let’s keep it upbeat. Red balloons are here. And a colorful xylophone. Or glockenspiel – whichever is the metal one. Did the drop cap get bigger with more lines of text? It shouldn’t. So it’s 2.5 ish lines big.

The world’s thy ship and not thy home.
St. Thérèse de Lisieux

A NICE paragraph to start the experiment. Can we access stylistic alternates with CSS here? The drop cap only spans two lines. Think of other things to type. Let’s keep it upbeat. Red balloons are here. And a colorful xylophone. Or glockenspiel – whichever is the metal one. Did the drop cap get bigger with more lines of text? It shouldn’t. So it’s 2.5 ish lines big.

So, the idea is to make a new paragraph and a class for a fancier and probably bigger drop cap. The current class is has-drop-cap. So maybe make the new one has-fancy-drop-cap. To the CSS editor!!! This paragraph needed a few more words to cover the drop cap. Hopefully a few more sentences will cover it. I can’t hear the cicadas anymore. I wonder why. Cicadas are pretty amazing, but I’m grateful they only turn up every few years.

The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of it’s scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.
St. Thérèse de Lisieux

Some flimsy reason to start another paragraph with a slightly different letter S. I’m crocheting a pentagonal face washer. It was going to be a Granny Square, but working the first round into a ring at the beginning gave me 15 stitches and I thought I could make a Tudor Rose out of it. Maybe I’ll publish a book of crochet motifs next. I wonder if there’s a LaTeX package for typesetting crochet diagrams.

THIS span way of working seems to line up the drop cap better – I’m using Chrome on an iMac just now, but will go check on Firefox on Linux soon. I wish the CEO of Firefox would apologise for firing that guy so I can stop boycotting them – though I guess it might be more ethical to use a fork like iceweasel. I think Seamonkey was a firefox fork too. The browser wars just kept getting more complicated.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

About Veronica Brandt

Veronica Brandt holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering. She lives near Sydney, Australia, with her husband and six children.—(Read full biography).

PDF Download • Vespers for the Dead

Mr. Albert Bloomfield kindly sent me “Vespers for the Dead”—which does not fulfill a priest’s obligation to pray the Divine Office, yet is often prayed when a loved one dies. Here is formatting A, and here it is again with formatting B.

—Jeff Ostrowski

20 October 2020 • “What we can’t share”

Almighty God has given to us the example of the Jesuit Martyrs of North America, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday. Of course, along with those eight martyrs we honor their associates, e.g Father François Bressani. I can’t share with you the torments Father Bressani underwent at the hands of Iroquois: it is too brutal. It would tear your heart out. But I will share what Bressani’s Superior said, after receiving a letter from him: “The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer has only one finger left on his right hand, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds—which are still open—from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth.” If you have the stomach for it, read what Father Bressani (d. 1672) underwent for Jesus Christ. Let his example help us never fall into sins of impurity, avarice, ingratitude, or envy.

—Jeff Ostrowski

13 October 2020 • Chopin talks Bach

My “pianist pedigree” goes from my teacher through Wiktor Łabuński through Felix Blumenfeld, who studied with Anton Rubinstein. I always considered myself part of the “Bach-Mozart-Chopin school” as opposed to the “Handel-Beethoven-Liszt school.” (Needless to say, there’s great overlap between these schools.) Before giving a concert, Frédéric Chopin would always shut himself up in a room and play through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The year Chopin died, he spent considerable time with the painter, Eugène Delacroix (d. 1863), who recounts hearing Chopin launch into a monologue on the transcendence of J.S. Bach, insisting that “the fugue is like pure logic in music,” and that “to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music.”

—Jeff Ostrowski