Re: [libreoffice-users] Drop Caps Character Style in Writer

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 <webmaster@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.
>
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