From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using drop caps - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using drop caps

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- [Presenter] Much of the art of design revolves around drawing your reader's eye to where you want them to look, and one of the best ways to draw the eye to the beginning of a story or a section is with a drop cap. InDesign lets you easily apply a drop cap to any paragraph, and the most direct path to the drop cap is the control panel. Let's place our text cursor inside this first paragraph and zoom in to 200% by pressing command or control + 2. Now, remember, you don't have to select the whole paragraph to apply paragraph formatting. Just having the cursor flashing in there is enough. Next, we want to make sure our control panel is in paragraph mode. Yep, there it is. And next I'm going to come over here and change these drop cap settings. The top one is the number of lines that you want it to drop. Right now, it's set to one, but you can change that number or just click these little arrows next to the field. There's two lines and there's three lines. The other field down below that is the number of characters that should drop down. Right now it's set to one, so we only have the letter E, but if I change this to five and press return or enter, now the whole word is dropped. This is still editable text, of course, so let's change the formatting. So let's change the control panel to character formatting mode, and then let's say make it all caps, and let's change the tracking to say -50. Also, I'll change the color. Let's make it this brown color. That looks much better. The only problem I'm seeing here is that the drop cap is really close to the word after it. To adjust that, you can place your cursor just before the word "year." There's actually a little space before that word, and the cursor needs to be between the space and the word. Now, I can change the kerning. I'll head up here and add some, let's say maybe 50. By adjusting the kerning, you can see that it pushes that text away from the drop cap, not just that first line, but all the lines next to the drop cap. We can even make this drop cap bigger, turning it into what some people call a raised cap. I'll select it and increase its size to say 14 points. So now these characters are both dropped and raised. As you can see, you can create all kinds of interesting typographic effects with drop caps. Just let your imagination go wild.

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