[Jellby]

Originally Posted by brewt

I wasn't trying to pick on you (really really).

I didn't take it that way, don't worry.

Oh wait. The Sony stuff is Windows only, and you're running on Linux, if I recall.

Yes, and I tried unsuccessfully to install Calibre (and ADE in a virtual machine), so right now I don't have any real ePUB reader...

Originally Posted by llasram

IInstead, try setting a 'line-height' of 1em and a 'height' of 1em. That should force the size of the block and line-box to be the same. That said, you probably don't want to set the font size to 400% -- that's 4x the font-size, but the default 'line-height' is probably more than 1.0. The only way to get consistent results is to set the default line-height to a value you control such as 1.2, then you can set the font-size in the drop-cap to something like 4.8em to force it to be 4 lines tall.

Silly me, I thought a line-height with no units would be a multiple of the current line-height, not just ems... Well, I don't care that much that the drop-cap is an exact number of lines (and I'm reluctant to specify a line-height for normal text, that should be set by the reader), I'm more worried about having unnecessary blank margins above (and especially below) the drop cap. Even if I specify "line-height: 1em; height: 1em", the box is larger that the letter... but I guess that's unavoidable, and depends on the exact font and character (a parenthesis or a Q or accented letter may extend above or below other usual letters).

So, we need to find a compromise. I think it could be enough to combine your suggestion with a negative top-margin, so I propose this:

span.drop {
  font-size: 400%;
  font-weight: bold;
  float: left;
  margin: -0.15em 0.125em 0 0;
  line-height: 1em;
  height: 1em;
}

For testing purposes, I'm uploaded the modified book (without illustrations, to reduce filesize), I'd be glad to see screenshots from Sony, ADE and Calibre...