Creating Drop Caps

A dropped capital letter, called a drop cap, is the first character of a paragraph that has been enlarged and hangs down into the body of the paragraph. Drop caps are frequently used at the beginning of a story. When set correctly, drop caps can add a professional touch to your publication.

The easiest way to create a drop cap is with the Drop Cap plug-in. All you have to do is place the text cursor in the paragraph and choose Utilities>Plug-ins > Drop Cap which results in the Drop Cap dialog box as shown below. You will be asked to enter the size of the drop cap; three lines is the default. The number of lines will determine how large the drop cap is. Needless to say, you would not want the size to be greater than the number of lines in the paragraph. In fact, drop caps would look out of place on short paragraphs.

Before clicking OK to create the drop cap, you may want to click the Apply command button to preview this special effect. Then, if you do not like the size, you can enter a different number of lines without leaving the dialog box. Note that you must remove the current drop cap with the Remove command button before you can apply a new size.

The Prev and Next buttons allow you to move the cursor to other paragraphs without having to leave the Drop Cap dialog box.