title: How to absolutely position the baseline of text in HTML
body: <p>I'm puzzled by the following problem. I wish to (absolutely) position the baseline of some piece of HTML text at a certain y-coordinate, while the text should be starting at a certain x-coordinate. The following diagram clearly demonstrates the issue.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/xPzFwwp.png" alt="a diagram"></p>
  
  <p>So I basically want to control where the point (x,y), henceforth called the "basepoint", in the diagram is located on the screen, relative to the top-left corner of the BODY of the document or some DIV. Important: I don't know beforehand what the font-family or font-size of the text is. This is important, because I don't want to change all the positions in my CSS whenever I change fonts.</p>
  
  <p>In the following code, I try to position the basepoint at (200,100), but instead it positions the top-left of the DIV at that point.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
      &lt;style&gt;
          BODY
          {
              position: absolute;
              margin: 0px;
          }
  
          #text
          {
              position: absolute;
              top: 100px;
              left: 200px;
  
              font-family: helvetica, arial; /* may vary */
              font-size: 80px;               /* may vary */
          }
      &lt;/style&gt;
      &lt;body&gt;
          &lt;div id="text"&gt;css=powerful&lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So how should I modify this code? Should I use the vertical-align property of the enclosing DIV? (I tried, but couldn't get the desired result).</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any useful replies.</p>