Tab Leaders, Drop Caps, and Hanging Punctuation in InDesign and QuarkXPress. (Page 2)

Drop Caps-What are they?

To almost everyone reading this, drop caps are a typographic decoration that need no introduction. It is worth saying, though, that these large, multiline majuscules, placed at the top of an introductory paragraph or at the top of a column of text, that arrests the attention and guides the eye to the proper entry spot. It can be styled and decorated in just about any way imaginable; today’s layout software makes it easy to do.

There are, of course, other graphical solutions to drop caps: placed illustrations with appropriate text wrap. But for those situations when simplicity is called for, the following typographic approach is best.

Drop Caps in InDesign

Drop caps are accessible via paragraph formatting functions. These are available through either the Paragraph palette (Mac: CMD-OPT-T, Win: CTRL-ALT-T or Menu: Window>Type & Tables>Paragraph) or via the Control Palette’s paragraph view. On the Paragraph palette, they are the bottom-most two boxes, on the Control Palette, on the lower edge in the middle. The pictorial icons should give them away plainly.

There are two parameters InDesign allows you to specify: number of lines (as counted from the first and including spaces), labeled with a large A standing out of a paragraph, and number of spaces (as counted from the first line down and labeled with a similar icon but with a large upper and lower case A standing out)

The InDesign Paragraph palette highlighting drop cap controls; right, number of lines; left, number of characters. Similar accesses can be found in the control palette.

Specifying this at 2 and 1, respectively, results in a single large cap, two lines deep:

If we want the first two words of that paragraph drop-capped, we specify 7 as the number of characters (six letters plus the space between):

Drop cap characters with lines set to two and characters set to seven.

Drop Caps in QuarkXPress

QuarkXPress’s drop cap control is found, again, in Paragraph Attributes, this time under the Format tab (Mac: CMD-SHIFT-F, Win: ALT-SHIFT-F, or Menu: Style>Formats). After selecting the paragraph, check the Drop Caps check box (which turns that section of the pane on) and specifying Character Count and Line Count as appropriate.

Quark Paragraph Attributes dialog with drop caps turned on in the Formats tab. A 2-line, 1-character drop is specified. Quark allows up to 127 characters and 16 lines designated for drop caps.

Find out about hanging punctuation on Page 3.