Line-Height

Although line-height, or leading, might ordinarily be considered a text formatting property, it is treated as a block element when designing for Microsoft Reader.

The line-height property of text in a container is inherited by text in nested containers.

Generally speaking, there are two ways to specify line-height: absolute and scalable. You can define an absolute specification in any number of units, such as points, centimeters, or pixels. However, it is generally best to avoid these absolute units because:

  1. The range of available page sizes is such that a line-height value specified to be 18 points might look reasonable on a Windows version of the Reader, but it might look enormous on a Pocket PC version of the Reader.

  2. Reader default font sizes are defined by a table of values that creates a well-tuned relationship between font size and line-height. When an absolute line-height value is specified, this default tuning is likely to be lost.

The recommended choice is to leave line-height to its default value based on font size and to use CSS properties such as larger, smaller, x-small, etc.; or HTML tags such as <big> and <small> instead.

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