Hi :) Drop Caps pre-dates printing and wikipedia shows an example c.200 on papyrus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial but i found this link easier to make sense of http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/03/drop-caps-historical-use-and-current-best-practices/
Apparently in the early days of printing they would leave a space for the letter and an illustrator could be hired to carefully create the letter after the book had been printed and sold! Some were a lot more ornate than others! In web-design we sometimes do roughly the same nowadays with that first letter being an image that the text wraps around. Of course it's a lot easier nowadays and it's easier to replace the image if it looks a bit wrong and tehre are other ways of doing it. Regards from Tom :) >________________________________ > From: webmaster-Kracked_P_P <webmas...@krackedpress.com> >To: users@global.libreoffice.org >Sent: Sunday, 27 January 2013, 21:27 >Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Drop Caps Character Style in Writer > >On 01/27/2013 03:35 PM, Brian Barker wrote: >> At 14:07 27/01/2013 -0500, Kevin O'Brien wrote: >>> I was working on understanding Character Styles in Writer, and it seems >>> mostly straightforward. But I noticed that the Drop Caps style does not >>> seem to do anything at all. Is that a bug or am I misunderstanding >>> something here? >> >> I'm guessing here, but I think I can see its usefulness. You set drop caps >> as a property of your paragraph or paragraph style, of course. You may not >> wish the dropped cap to have the same character style as the rest of the >> paragraph text. So the Drop Caps tab of the Paragraph or Paragraph Style >> dialogue gives you the opportunity to select a separate character style to >> be applied to the dropped caps themselves. I'm guessing that the Drop Caps >> character style is provided as a convenient style to use for this purpose: >> you can select it in the paragraph or paragraph style properties and then >> set the character properties that you want in the Drop Caps character style. >> >> You could alternatively create your own character style(s), of course. But >> that's true of all the predefined styles. >> >> I trust this helps. >> >> Brian Barker > >I have seen this done with books. the take the first character of the first >paragraph of a chapter and use a larger or different font style of character. >They have been doing this thing since the early days of printing. Some people >call this "type" of thing "illumination" or something like that. Many times >the that first character is in color or some really fancy font style [as we >call it now]. > >There are some really interesting things that can be done with Writer and its >font/text styling, but I know only a few of them. > >Sometimes it is easier for me to do it with graphic images or changing the >font, but sometimes it is harder that way. > >-- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org >Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ >Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette >List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ >All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted > > > > -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
