Drop Cap Text in Publisher

[mnh]

Hi All,

I am moving from Serif PagePlus to Affinity Publisher, so still learning.

Is there a Drop Cap text or leading character text feature in Affinity Publisher? In PagePlus I can select the paragraph, right click and select Drop Cap, and then I can select Dropped or Raised. Anything like that in Affinity Publisher? Thanks in advance

[Fixx]

In Publisher it is quite a normal paragraph style feature, also available in Paragraph panel.

[mnh]

Hi Fixx,

Thanks for the quick reply. I had not seen earlier, paragraph object selected, in the right hand pane, paragraph tab, then scroll down, and expand "Drop Caps".

[lacerto]

(...)

[Old Bruce]

For a "raised cap" I first make a Character Style, "Drop Cap", with No Change for everything except the Scaling which I set at 200% or 300% for 2 or 3 lines. Then I set up a Paragraph Style and choose 1 line for the height and the "Drop Cap" Character Style.

[MikeW]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

For a "raised cap" I first make a Character Style, "Drop Cap", with No Change for everything except the Scaling which I set at 200% or 300% for 2 or 3 lines. Then I set up a Paragraph Style and choose 1 line for the height and the "Drop Cap" Character Style.

I do the a similar thing in QXP. I also hang the leading raised cap about 5% depending on point size.

Just for a bit of automation, I do use what Q calls "conditional styles" so I can click into the (typically) chap start paragraph and it sets the p.style and applies the c.style to the first character (the c.style just uses a larger point size versus scaling).

[lacerto]

(...)

[heinz1970]

Is there a way to change the font of the Drop Cap character? It seems to be always the same font as the paragraph. It also seems to be always in italic, can't change the style.

[GarryP]

12 minutes ago, heinz1970 said:

Is there a way to change the font of the Drop Cap character?

Create a Character Style and then apply that Character Style via the Drop Caps section of the Paragraph Panel – see attached image.

[heinz1970]

Thank you, I have done that but I found out I would need to create a new character style outside the paragraph to change the drop cap.

[GarryP]

2 minutes ago, heinz1970 said:

I found out I would need to create a new character style outside the paragraph to change the drop cap.

I don’t understand what you mean by that.

Can you describe it in a different way?

[heinz1970]

If I just mark the drop cap letter in a paragraph where the drop cap is already set I can't change the style of the drop cap. I need to open a new text field enter a letter set the character style of Drop cap, change the styling and then update the character style.

I also have the issue that the baseline of the drop caps seem to be different, which might not be much an issue when drop cap is 2 or 3 line but it's very visible when its just 1 line high. Certain characters are flying.

[GarryP]

If you want to change the formatting of all Drop Caps, don’t change the formatting of the Drop Cap text directly in the Frame Text layer.

Once a Character Style has been created and applied to the Drop Caps formatting, editing that Character Style should make those changes appear wherever that Character Style has been applied.

23 minutes ago, heinz1970 said:

but it's very visible when its just 1 line high.

I don’t know how Drop Caps is supposed to work for a single line height so I can’t comment further on that.

If you can supply an example document then someone might be able to help further.

[heinz1970]

That might be an off-topic issue but it seems to be even different from paragraph to paragraph with the same letters. Like here with the B