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2.Zoom into the rst paragraph. Select the Text Tool. Click anywhere in the rst

paragraph of the story.

1.Open your document.

GRA1121 Juliet Antipolo

Print Publishing February 28, 2013

A Drop Cap is the commonly used technique in storybooks in which the rst letter of a

paragraph appears as if it is hanging from the top line and part of it crosses into the rows

(lines) below. Sometimes the drop cap technique is applied to more than one letter at the

beginning of the paragraph.

How to Create a Drop Cap

There are three ways to access Drop Caps options:

Paragraph Formatting Controls toolbar

Paragraph panel

Drop Caps and Nested Styles in the Paragraph panel menu

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1.At the toolbar at the top, click the Paragraph Formatting Controls button beneath

the letter A at the top left to reveal that section. In the bottom row, you will see the

Drop Cap Number of Lines option (3rd text eld in the bottom row). The default value

is 0. It displays how many rows the rst character of that paragraph will hang into. By

clicking the arrow up or changing the value to 1 row, the character will not change appear-ance, because by default characters only occupy one row at a time.

Paragraph Formatting Controls Toolbar

2.If you click the up arrow again or type in 2 or a higher number, the rst character

grows. In the example below, the number 4 is displayed. Now look at the letter O

on the page. It now hangs into 4 rows of text.

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1.To display the Paragraph panel, press Command+Option+T (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+T

(Windows). This looks similar to the Paragraph Formatting Controls toolbar. Find

the Drop Cap Number of Lines option at the bottom left.

2.Click the arrow up to indicate how many rows your rst character will drop. In this

example, the number 4 is displayed and the letter O on the page hangs into 4 rows

of text.

Paragraph Panel

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Drop Caps and Nested Styles dialogue box

from the Paragraph panel menu

1.To access this option, you need to have the Paragraph panel open. To display the

paragraph panel, press Command+Option+T (Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+T (Windows). At the

upper right, click on the panel menu icon.

2.In the drop-down menu, select

Drop Caps and Nested Styles...

You may also access this dialogue box

directly by pressing Command+Option+R

(Mac) or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R (Windows).

3. In the Drop Caps andNested Styles dia-logue box that pops up, the

rst eld at the left indicates

how many rows the rst char-

acter will drop into.

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4. The Drop Caps and Nested Styles dialogue box has a few extra options. For now,lets concentrate on the Align Left Edge option. In the example below, it is un-checked. Notice how the O is not exactly aligned with the left edge and does not touch the

purple margin line.

5.Check the box to activate the Align Left Edge option. Now look at the O. It is now

touching the purple margin line like the other rows of text.

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Dropping More Than One Character

You can drop more than one character by using each of the methods described earli-

er. The Drop Cap One or More Characters option is located directly to the right of the

Drop Cap Number of Lines option. The number indicates how many characters will be

dropped through the rows below.

In our example, we dropped 4 characters through 4 rows of text.