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• • March 6, 2012 at 9:33 am #61749
    jhandelun

    Member

    

    I am trying to create a paragraph style with the dropcap looking something like the image above in a scaleable fashion (with the drop cap centered inside a box). Have tried a good amount of googling and can't seem to find a good solution to this. Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

  • March 6, 2012 at 10:22 am #61750
    cdweeks

    Participant

    I'm no expert, but my thought is to create a paragraph style that includes a drop cap with a particular character style. When defining the character style, under “character color” make it paper (white), then under “underline options” create an orange underline of a large enough weight to make it cover the background. Just adjust the offset so that it's centered properly.

    The technique of combining paper-colored text with an underline so huge it becomes the background color is something I learned from Nigel French's InDesign courses at lynda.com.

  • March 6, 2012 at 1:01 pm #61751
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    That's an excellent idea. You can fool InDesign into displaying the character at a smaller size by setting its Horizontal and Vertical scale to something like 75%.

  • March 7, 2012 at 7:46 am #61759
    jhandelun

    Member

    Thank you for this solution cdweeks, there is only one thing I have left to figure out. Pictured below is how it looks right now, how can I expand the width of the underline and then center the letter inside of it?

    Again, thanks so much for your help.

    

  • March 7, 2012 at 4:44 pm #61769
    cdweeks

    Participant

    Well now, that is trickier than I anticipated. There aren't as many underline options for character styles as for paragraph styles, so it seems with this method the underline is limited to the letter: as the letter gets smaller, so does the underline.

    Next I tried keeping the drop cap paper-colored but trying to get the colored background via a paragraph rule with a huge right indent. Horizontal spacing was manageable with a mixture of first-line-indent (to get the letter away from the edge) and kerning between the drop cap and the second letter. Baseline shift handled vertical spacing. It seemed to work because I was working with a short paragraph… but then I realized the paragraph rule would turn into a verticle bar going down the whole length of the paragraph! Silly me.

    Next I tried keeping the drop cap paper-colored, handling the spacing using the above techniques, but getting the background color through a plain old separate frame behind the text frame. Yes, it works… but it would be a pain to keep updated through all your various edits. I was disappointed that it was impossible to anchor the object to the text without making it jump in front and cover up the paper-colored drop cap.

    Sorry I can't be more help. For one or two drop caps like this, it's okay to do it manually, but I agree it would be great to automate the process. If you can find a font that has negative letters, that would do it easily. For instance HF&J's “Whitney Index Black Square”… all you'd have to do is tell the drop cap to use that font, change the color, and you're done! Of course to buy a license for 1 computer to use the Whitney Index font styles is $99.

    Perhaps someone else in this forum can give you some more advice. Good luck!

  • March 7, 2012 at 5:02 pm #61770
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    cdweeks’ solution is indeed brilliant. (I mean the first post. His/Her second post was written as I was writing this.) I played around with it a bit and was able to make the underline wider by specifying that the drop cap (in the paragraph style definition) should be three characters rather than just one. I then placed a hair space either side of the first character and, since the underline description in the dropcap character style applies to all three “characters” (ie., includes the two hair spaces), it seemed to achieve the result you wanted.

    I see three minor problems with this technique:

    1. I can’t see any automated way to insert the hair spaces, whereas the paragraph style definition automates the rest of it. Perhaps those skilled at grep can come up with one but I freely admit to being a grep ignoramus.
    2. Inserting those hair spaces, specifically the right-hand one, probably leads to a mis-spelled first word of the paragraph — no big deal but a little annoying.
    3. I would wish for some way to have a little bit of white space to the right of the coloured box. As it is, the next letter of that first word and, of course, the first letter of the first word on the second and third lines (and however many lines your drop cap covers) are hard up against the coloured box.

    All that aside, I think the look is pretty cool. As well as defining the colour of the dropcap character style as “paper”, I gave it a 0.25pt black stroke which I think sets it off more cleanly against the orange background.

  • March 8, 2012 at 1:43 am #61772
    cdweeks

    Participant

    Furry: also brillant! This is great teamwork. Setting the drop cap to 3 characters and manually adding the thin spaces around the character is a great solution for getting the underline to cover more space.

    As for addressing the problem of the first three lines bumping against the right side of the colored box, some manual kerning will do the trick. Insert your cursor to the left of the second letter (between the last drop cap character and the first regular character) and press alt+right arrow as many times as necessary– it will move all 3 lines over to the right, not just the first line, because it affects the space around the entire drop cap. If alt+right arrow is moving in too small or too big increments, you can change the increment under Preferences > Units & Increments – at the bottom is the increment for kerning/tracking.

  • March 8, 2012 at 8:33 am #61776
    jhandelun

    Member

    I tried this three character technique yesterday before reading your posts, I have gotten it to work that way. Got the desired space to the right of the box with a tracking of 200 in the drop cap character style. My concern is how it will work in an editorial environment where the proof readers are sure to remove the spaces. But if they are informed on this then maybe we can get it to work. Below is a picture of how it looks.

    

    I also tried using Whitney with black squares, which would work perfectly if it wasn't for the fact that Whitney Index black squares doesn't support Icelandic characters – so that is a no go for me.

    Thank you so much for your help, this has really been informing.

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