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 February
7, 1999
Creating a Drop Cap
Inline
graphic techniques
 reating
Drop Caps is nothing new in the Desktop Publishing world. They
are commonly used at the beginning of a chapter in a lot of books to
accentuate the first letter in a paragraph. Many programs have the option
to automatically create them and wrap text accordingly. FreeHand™
doesn't have the option built in, so you have to create the graphic
Drop Cap and add it to your text block as an Inline Graphic.
You can control this Inline Graphic just like any character or block of type using the Type Options palette. Below I show you how easy it is to use Inline Graphics to create a Drop Cap letter.
Version: 3 and above
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A Drop Cap should always recreate
the certain style that a story invokes and should be used the
same way throughout the rest of the article/story.
Remember that a Drop Cap is usually
created from the first letter of the first paragraph of
an article/story. In my above example, I want to make a Drop Cap
out of the letter G in the first paragraph. (The
above text is nonsense I made up in about 2 minutes. Any similarity
with something already written is purely coincidental). |
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So I start creating my Drop Cap.
First I type out the G and give it a fantasy-like font
like the example above at left. I then convert it to paths so
I can add a Radial Gradient fill. Lastly I add a slight
drop shadow to make it pop off the page a little. Once I'm finished
I select all the pieces and group them together like the example
above at right.
Now select this group and Copy it. |
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Now with the Text tool, I
select the letter G and choose Paste under the Edit menu.
The text should be replaced with the graphic letter you just created.
This is called an Inline Graphic. There are many other
uses for Inline Graphics that I'll go into in other tips, but
for now lets just concentrate on this Drop Cap.
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As an Inline Graphic, you can control
everything via the Text Inspector palette.
First just select the graphic like you would a letter with the Text tool. Then in the Text Inspector, start changing some of the attributes to tweak the size and placement of the Inline Graphic.
In the above example I moved the Drop Cap down by decreasing the Baseline shift to -21 pts. The Drop Cap automatically is set to have a Run Around Selection. You can further edit this via the Text Inspector in the Graphic element pull-down menu. Also by adjusting the Kerning to -7, this moved the rest of the word "ordy" closer to the Drop Cap. |
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This next example is quite a different
style of Drop Cap. This one appears to hang over the text in the
Left margin. To get this kind of effect you need to set the Left
and First indents so that they compliment each other.
Like in the above example, The Left indent is how much I moved the whole paragraph over to the right (32 pts.). The First Indent must be the exact negative (-32 pts.) in order for the Drop Cap to be Left most. |
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One problem area you should be made
aware of is using Horizontal Scale on an Inline Graphic.
My experience with it has been very unpredictable and often generates
problems like in the above example where the word week
overlaps the Drop Cap regardless of the Run Around Selection
setting. Just stretch or size your graphics first, then add them
to your block of text.
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Now that you've created this Inline Graphic, you can move the text block and the graphic will always move with it. This is just one example of using Inline Graphics, if you have any you'd like to share, please tell me via the Feedback page. 
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