Initials in Affinity publisher

[BenW]

In Affinity puplisher you can set how many lines the initial should cover. I wonder how you can set the initial eg 2 lines high with the initial sitting on the first line of the paragraph as marked in the attachment.

 

Look forward for any useful hint.

 

[Oufti]

16 minutes ago, BenW said:

Look forward for any useful hint.

You could use the same trick described here by @MikeTO:

Instead of defining a character style as All Caps,

1. You define a character style with a larger body size (say 24 pt)
2. You modify your paragraph style with Drop Caps enabled, with Height set to 1 line, Characters set to 1, and Style set to the new character style you just created.

.  

 

[thomaso]

The "Drop Caps" option is a paragraph style property:

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Text/dropcaps.html

[Oufti]

Indeed, but the style you apply to the drop cap is a character style. Problem is that, as I tested just now, the body size defined in it will not be applied to the Initial drop cap (as its size is constrained by the number of lines defined in Drop cap section). The rest of formatting seems to work well… 

Thus I don't see how to automate this formatting, alack.

[MikeTO]

There is a way to do this but it's another trick.

1. Define a character style for the first character
2. Insert a Zero-Width Joiner between the first and second characters (U+200D) - when yo type U+200D and convert it using Ctrl+U it will be selected to before you change the selection choose Copy to copy it to the clipboard
3. In the paragraph style, set Initial Words to enabled, Max Word Count to 1, and paste the clipboard into the End Characters so that the initial "word" ends at that invisible space. Press Return after entering that. Set Style to the character style you defined.

The only gotcha with this trick is if you adjust the character style you will need to reselect it from the Style dropdown because of a minor bug.

Cheers

[Oufti]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

The only gotcha with this trick is if you adjust the character style you will need to reselect it from the Style dropdown because of a minor bug.

Another potential annoyance is that since you add an invisible character in the first word, you won't find it with a common search. Otherwise it works well. 

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, BenW said:

2 lines high with the initial sitting on the first line of the paragraph

6 hours ago, Oufti said:

Problem is that, as I tested just now, the body size defined in it will not be applied to the Initial drop cap (as its size is constrained by the number of lines defined in Drop cap section).

Sorry I didn't notice the special desire in my previous post. – It appears to work and for regular use with upscaling the DropCap character style by its horizontal + vertical scaling value as wanted. This will scale the initial character accordingly, regardless of the font size of the paragraph style … and without the need for additional special characters.

[lacerto]

I might have misunderstood something of the goal, but one solution could perhaps be applying an initial word (max 1) paragraph formatting with all letters of the alphabet (and figures 0 to 9) defined as formatting stoppers, and a character style to define the initial itself. This would allow automated formatting, as demonstrated below:

 

 

[Oufti]

@thomaso & @lacerto: Great workarounds!

[lacerto]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

This will scale the initial character accordingly, regardless of the font size of the paragraph style … and without the need for additional special characters.

This is great, I had not realized that scaling with 1 line is free of the line spacing multiplication limitation (contrary to multiple line drop caps where scaling is automatic), so the scaling can basically be anything and even overlap any text above without adding space, so exact line spacing and space above alone determine the space above (similarly as when doing this with the initial word trick). "Auto" mode of drop caps is also smart enough to allow preceding properly formatted drop caps, like quotation marks, and ignored markers like zero-width space that allow automated formatting. Drop caps have also some additional formatting control so it is really the preferred method to do this! 

[thomaso]

32 minutes ago, lacerto said:

This is great, I had not realized that scaling with 1 line is free of the line spacing multiplication limitation (contrary to multiple line drop caps where scaling is automatic), so the scaling can basically be anything and even overlap any text above without adding space,

Not sure if its great (or if I understand you correctly). It appears to vary with small leading. For instance top: 80%, bottom: 70%. Apart from the fact that such a low leading is rather rarely used (especially with drop caps): Do you have an idea what exactly triggers the right shift/offset of the drop caps when overlapping in the bottom example? It seems also above with leading 80% the drop caps + body are partially overlapping but just a little less.

[thomaso]

If in V1 a character style which is saved in the Text Style panel gets a property changed while it is applied for drop caps in text frame's paragraphs then it gets its instances in various text frames updated only if the paragraph style is also a saved style in the Text Styles panel.

Is this the expected behaviour for an assigned Drop Caps style? ... and the same in V2?

[lacerto]

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

Do you have an idea what exactly triggers the right shift/offset of the drop caps when overlapping in the bottom example?

I probably did not understand fully what you mean and leading constructions are quite tricky (much because they are so powerful). When I tested this, I think I could make it behave consistently, excepting the Drop Caps based based formatting where small leading causes an anomaly, a kind of a two-line drop cap, while when using Initial Word based initial, this does not happen.

 

 

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

Is this the expected behaviour for an assigned Drop Caps style? ... and the same in V2?

My brain hearts already, but I'll try: if you meant that manual changes to initial character do not have effect in case the initial is formatted based on a character style saved as part of a paragraph style then I think it is "by design", and meant to be protective (the applied character style is in a way implicit, it does not show similarly as a manually applied character style, which could be manually edited; I think it is similarly in InDesign). 

Initialsv1.afpub

Initialsv2.afpub

BTW: The initial formats and styles for the version 1, attached above, were created by copy pasting from version 2 (apparently the only way to do it), and it was awkward: in practice nearly everything had to be redefined in version 1.

[thomaso]

On 1/24/2024 at 7:05 AM, lacerto said:

On 1/24/2024 at 12:38 AM, thomaso said:

Do you have an idea what exactly triggers the right shift/offset of the drop caps when overlapping in the bottom example?

I probably did not understand fully what you mean

It is less a question of practical use but rather my curiosity to understand what causes drop caps to get moved to the right with a reduced leading. While without drop caps all lines overlap with a small leading, for drop caps it seems there is a threshold that prevents them from overlapping and moves them instead. For instance below: 72% leading overlaps drop caps – 71% moves them:

… or with different fonts and the initial setup of v/h-sized drop cap chars:

In comparison, a Baseline Shift applied to drop caps causes a vertical move as expected -> the resulting gap below appears more logical:

[lacerto]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

It is less a question of practical use but rather my curiosity to understand what causes drop caps to get moved to the right with a reduced leading.

I think the trigger is if leading gets so small that the "drop cap" of the next paragraph hits the baseline of the preceding line, so it depends also on the character that acts as a "drop cap". UPDATE: If it is a continuing line (instead of multiple drop caps on one-line paragraphs), the trigger is if any of the character shapes on the next line hits the bounding box of the "drop cap", then the wrap occurs [in my demo above it is the character "h" that hits the baseline of the drop cap]. This does not happen when using the Initial Word trick.  UPDATE2: The actual baseline can be shifted up or down so it seems to be the zero baseline that counts!