Good morning friends,
One thing I want to ensure is that these letters look like, well, letters as much as possible.
I like letters. They're containers, really. They present their contents in a predictable fashion. (They also enable me to write them as letters - and hopefully for you to read them as such, too - which I think helps us both.)
One little tweak I've made to try and preserve their letteriness is a wider margin on the page. Typed letters tend to have a decent amount of white space around the edges, so I've tried to set that for these.
My next challenge is handling responsive design - making the letters grow and shrink with the size of the window, and making sure that the proportions of the font and the sheet of paper itself respond accordingly. Otherwise they'll look strange on a phone's tall and narrow screen, rather than still presenting as a letter.
A couple of challenges here, then: first, letters are normally on a tall sheet of paper like A4, A5, or the mysterious American 'letter'. And second, if I want the letter to scale as a letter, the text should scale a little with it. But I need to make sure it's not too small to read on a phone. So I may need to come up with some ground rules, like character limits. This approach actually appeals, becaue if I was writing on a typewriter on a fixed-width piece of paper, using a fixed-width font, I would have a hard character limit. So I just need to come up with a comfortable one for multiple screen widths. Maybe like A5, or that weird, almost square format that letter-writers in the past used...
Anyway. That should give me something to focus on. I had briefly considered setting the aspect ratio of the .letter 'container', but the problem with doing this is it forces a page length limit and would mean establishing a way to 'flow' text from one to another after a set number of characters. Fine on some desktop publishing software, but perhaps a little beyond me and my HTML skills for this little project...
Have a great day,
peessee