texttop

Texttop is a term used in typography and digital typesetting to describe the alignment of inline content with the upper edge of the line box, rather than with the baseline or the middle of the glyphs. It denotes how the top boundary of an element’s content sits in relation to the font metrics of the surrounding text.

In practice, texttop refers to an alignment option that can be applied to inline elements such as icons, diacritics, or short text snippets. The exact rendering depends on font metrics, line height, and the rendering engine, which means the perceived top alignment can vary between fonts and platforms. The concept is often discussed in the context of layout decisions where precise top alignment improves visual consistency, especially when combining different glyph sizes or font families.

The term is used loosely in many design and development environments. In CSS terms, the closest recognized mechanism is the vertical-align property with the value text-top, which aligns the top of the element with the top of the parent font’s line box. However, cross-platform implementations may differ, and the resulting alignment can be affected by factors such as font ascenders, cap height, and line-height settings.

Applications of texttop include aligning small UI elements with text in interfaces, ensuring consistent top alignment for accented characters, and improving typographic harmony in multilingual layouts where font metrics vary significantly. While not a formal standard, texttop remains a descriptive label in typography discussions and can guide practical decisions about inline element positioning.

See also: vertical-align, baseline, cap height, ascender, line height, glyph metrics.