Vanishing dropcap.

Proper dropcap.

Explanation of bug: In Safari as of 5.1.7 (Lion) and Chrome 19 if you use a :first-letter pseudoclass to apply a font referenced via an @font-face directive, and the first letter is part of a word in an italicized style (em or i), the character in question vanishes when the page is first loaded or re-loaded. Resizing the window will cause it to immediately reappear, while doing a reload after it has reappeared will cause it to disappear again.

Notably, it doesn't matter whether the external font file even exists; the character vanishes whether it is being rendered in the externally loaded font, or a system-installed fallback. It also appears that the character really isn't being rendered, since if margins are set on the drop cap the empty gap visibly changes size when the page is resized and the character reappears.

Adding an explicit :first-letter declaration for the italicized version causes the character not to disappear.