Please explain in detail how I get a paragraph whose initial capital letter is larger than the other capital letters in the same paragraph and also drops *below* the line it's on.
Hi Harold.
I've just been doing some fiddling with drop caps, and I have some suggestions. If you'd like more details, please ask.
Firstly, I would use paragraph styles for this job. Normally the paragraph with a drop cap would be the first paragraph after a heading. Whether it's Heading1, Heading2 etc would depend on the sort of document you are working on. Create a new paragraph style called Dropcaps (more details below). Then set up the "next style" field of the relevant heading style to be Dropcaps, and the "next style" field of Dropcaps to be your normal body text style (usually default or Text body).
When creating the Dropcaps style, create it from your normal body text style (usually default or Text body) by right clicking and selecting New. Name the style Dropcaps (or whatever sounds good to you). Click on the Drop Caps tab, and set up the options the way you would like them. Normally you would just adjust the number of lines (the default is 5). There are other options there that you can experiment with later.
Once you have set up your document this way, after you create a heading you should automatically get drop caps on the next line. If you have already typed your document, or would like drop caps in other places, you can simply apply the Dropcaps style manually to those paragraphs.
One final issue: short paragraphs. It seems that the height of the drop cap is limited to the height of the paragraph. In other words, if you have defined your drop cap to be five lines, but it is in a paragraph that is only two lines high, your drop cap will be only two lines high. It would be good if this was not the case!
The only work around that I know of is to use soft returns (shift-Enter) rather than hard returns (Enter) at the end of a short initial paragraph. Writer will then consider both paragraphs being one, and the drop cap will achieve its correct size. I normally hate manual formatting like this, but since you only need it at the beginning of each chapter or section, and not in all cases, I hope that it is not too painful.
I hope these steps and thoughts help. Adrian --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
