Drop cap

[Roberto.Bargagna]

Drop cap: it would be very useful to be able to specify the number of characters that must form the drop cap.

[Eugene Tyson]

Also, the use of strong, emphasis, these are web words - better to have Bold, Italics etc. better for typographical references especially for print docs. 

[Dave Harris]

2 hours ago, Roberto.Bargagna said:

Drop cap: it would be very useful to be able to specify the number of characters that must form the drop cap.

Do you want this to deal with leading quotes and punctuation? If so, we cope with that automatically.

[Dave Harris]

44 minutes ago, Hank_Scorpio said:

Also, the use of strong, emphasis, these are web words - better to have Bold, Italics etc. better for typographical references especially for print docs. 

The point of character styles is that they can change. For example, you might want to emphasise with colour instead of italics.

[Eugene Tyson]

2 minutes ago, Dave Harris said:

The point of character styles is that they can change. For example, you might want to emphasise with colour instead of italics.

Ah right - didn't realise these were related to text styles!

Suggest the text styles be named Italics, Bold, Bold Italic - instead. They are very web defined names. 

Cool text styles loaded by default - didn't notice. 

Can these be removed before starting a new doc?

[Dave Harris]

You can use Text > Text Styles > Detach and Delete All Styles to remove them from the current document, and then Save Text Styles as Default to set the current style sheet as default for new documents.

[Wosven]

Paragraph style doesn't seem to apply the character style (color, size, etc.) for drop caps (font size, color…).

And I think the default drop caps size is too short, it needs to begin at same level as "l" or highter character of the font.

[NightSky]

Please, please, pretty please: we really need to be able to specify the number of characters that has to be used as drop caps.

[garrettm30]

I agree. I do like the idea of the automatic implementation as currently in place, but sometimes we need to be able to explicitly input the number of characters, as auto can’t always know what we want to achieve. In another thread, I have given a couple examples from my work where this would be needed:

 

[Petar Petrenko]

It would be nice too, to have possibility to omit the first character if it is an interpunction symbol.

[Dave Harris]

On 10/13/2019 at 10:45 PM, NightSky said:

Please, please, pretty please: we really need to be able to specify the number of characters that has to be used as drop caps.

This will be in 1.8, and the next beta.

Petar, can you give an example? If a line begins

"The,

I think it would look weird if the opening quote was not the same size as the T.

[garrettm30]

27 minutes ago, Dave Harris said:

This will be in 1.8, and the next beta.

Excellent, and thank you for letting us know.

[Fixx]

On 9/1/2018 at 10:15 AM, Wosven said:

And I think the default drop caps size is too short, it needs to begin at same level as "l" or highter character of the font

That depends on font design but I agree drop cap should not line with x-height but cap height. There is a wonderful tick in drop cap style "Align left edge" so there should be "Align to cap height" too.

[Petar Petrenko]

5 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

This will be in 1.8, and the next beta.

Petar, can you give an example? If a line begins

"The,

I think it would look weird if the opening quote was not the same size as the T.

Opening quote wouldn't be so noticable in such a case. And together with a hanging interpunction (in the future) marks it could be really great.

[NightSky]

6 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

This will be in 1.8, and the next beta.

You just made my day ;) Thx

[fitzj]

Drop Capitals like they do in Indesign Please.  Create fancy designs around the Drop Capital.

 

[Dave Harris]

Fitzj, I believe you can do that in Publisher already. Have you tried? If you make the graphic pinned inline, it should behave like a character in virtually every way, including for drop caps.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 11/30/2019 at 10:41 PM, fitzj said:

Drop Capitals like they do in Indesign Please.  Create fancy designs around the Drop Capital.

This is not a Drop cap. It is inline graphic.

It would be nice if the text wraps at the right side of the curved Drop cap.

[Dave Harris]

1 hour ago, Petar Petrenko said:

This is not a Drop cap. It is inline graphic.

It would be nice if the text wraps at the right side of the curved Drop cap.

In InDesign is it both an inline graphic and a drop cap. I just tried in in Publisher, and it didn't work as well as I expected. The image gets sized and positioned correctly, but the next character gets drop-capped as well. You can avoid this in the 1.8 beta by setting the character count to 1. I'll tweak it so that using the auto character count only affects the image. Either way, I think the feature is better than in InDesign because the image scales automatically. This means you can change the number of lines dropped in a text style, and it will update the images in all the paragraphs that use the style.

You can achieve a similar result by using a floating graphic that wraps to largest side, but that's not as texty.

I've attached a document that shows both techniques.

PinDropCap.afpub

[Seneca]

8 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

You can achieve a similar result by using a floating graphic that wraps to largest side, but that's not as texty.

Thanks Dave,

Unfortunately all this only works if you create a text frame on the ordinary page. If you want to attach anything to the text frame created on master pages Publisher crashes immediately (the latest beta). Click on float with text then unklick it and publisher will crash immediately. This will also happen if you click on Inline in Text.

This has been a long standing problem for Publisher. I mean text frames created in master pages and how they interact with objects created on ordinary pages.

[Dave Harris]

On 12/5/2019 at 7:25 PM, Seneca said:

Thanks Dave,

Unfortunately all this only works if you create a text frame on the ordinary page. If you want to attach anything to the text frame created on master pages Publisher crashes immediately (the latest beta). Click on float with text then unklick it and publisher will crash immediately. This will also happen if you click on Inline in Text.

This has been a long standing problem for Publisher. I mean text frames created in master pages and how they interact with objects created on ordinary pages.

1.7.3 has a lot of problems in that area. 1.8.0.518 should be a lot better. I just tried with a new blank document and it seemed OK. Do you have a more detailed recipe?

[Seneca]

10 minutes ago, Dave Harris said:

Do you have a more detailed recipe?

Hello Dave,

Here is a short video demonstrating the problem. You can't attach anything to the text frames coming from master pages whether it is a graphic element or another text box.

This is on the latest Publisher beta.

 

 

[Old Bruce]

39 minutes ago, Seneca said:

Here is a short video demonstrating the problem.

I don't see that behaviour at all. No trouble with using images or shapes here. I didn't have any trouble with pinned images as drop caps or as just images.

[Seneca]

11 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I don't see that behaviour at all.

Thanks @Old Bruce, maybe I should reset my Publisher installation to see whether that will make any difference.

[Seneca]

Well, I did reset all Publisher options and still no luck. I hope it's not only me that has this problem.