I want CSS to have access to font metrics

[aarongustafson]

There are a lot of typography-related properties in CSS, but we are still far from what can be done in print. For instance, we rely on hacks to clean up the start/end of a paragraph's ascender/descender space for optical alignment. It would be useful to expose some font metrics to CSS to be able to adjust this in a clean way:

h1 {
  margin-top: calc(font(--x-height) - font(--ascender-height) );
}

Imagine the possibilities with a font function similar to custom properties or environment variables!

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https://webwewant.fyi/wants/129/

[phloe]

This would only do what you want as long as line-height is equal to line-height: normal (font(--ascender-height) + font(--descender-height)); ideally you would need to also subtract half of the difference between those two values (pseudo-code: (line-height - normal-line-height) / 2).

But this is covered in https://www.w3.org/TR/css-inline-3/#leading-trim