Drop cap does not align with the top of body text

[Kate H]

ETA I'm afraid i posted this in entirely the wrong place!

 

I'm having a problem with drop caps in Affinity Pub 2: The drop cap (using the paragraph style and a character style) does not align properly with the top of the text in the first line of the paragraph. It sits on the correct baseline, but the top of the character is below the body text ascenders. I am aware that in many fonts, the top of the uppercase letters is actually lower than some lower case ascenders, but it seems more pronounced in Affinity than in InDesign.

I tried scaling the drop cap character style, but this did not seem to have any effect. I could make it work by applying the scaling directly to an individual character, but as part of the drop cap character style, it did not seem to work.

I did a comparison with InDesign to demonstrate what I mean: I have not tweaked the positioning or other aspects of the styles in either program, it has never been necessary in ID.

The ID sample is first, the second paragraph is especially bad in Affinity, where the bar of the T is on a level with the baseline, the drop cap is in a font called Cicero

Edited December 10, 2022 by Kate H

[MikeTO]

Hi Kate, are you having this issue with all fonts or just Cicero?

I don't have Cicero but I tried it in Publisher 2 with several fonts, including Minion Pro (shown here), Avenir, Helvetica Neue, Adobe Caslon Pro, and Adobe Garamond Pro, and I couldn't find any problems. All I did was check Enabled, I didn't tweak any settings.

[walt.farrell]

@MikeTO: I see the same thing in your screenshot that @Kate H complained about. the top of the Drop Cap is below the top of the lower-case ascenders. Compare, for example, the T and h at the start of your second paragraph.

Not nearly as dramatically lower as in Kate's screenshot. Hers seems definitely wrong.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

@MikeTO: I see the same thing in your screenshot that @Kate H complained about. the top of the Drop Cap is below the top of the lower-case ascenders. Compare, for example, the T and h at the start of your second paragraph.

Not nearly as dramatically lower as in Kate's screenshot. Hers seems definitely wrong.

I think that is normal and ID does the same. The drop cap feature aligns the cap height of the drop cap T with the cap height of the next letter, h. In Minion Pro (left), the ascender of the h stretches above the cap height to the ascender line while in Helvetica Neue (right) the ascender ends at the cap height.

 

But I agree that something is wrong with the Kate's document. It would be nice to see a test document with this formatting. I've only been able to simulate it by changing the baseline values for the drop cap or following text and I don't think it's that because the base of the drop cap is still properly aligned.

Kate, you also said you never change the settings but I suggest looking into the Drop Caps > Align Left Edge and Scale for Descenders features. They may help you create more visually appealing drop caps.

Cheers