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cdweeks
ParticipantNone of the pdf/x presets give me an option to include hyperlinks, and indeed when exported the hyperlink does not work. Besides that the first and last pages still appear washed out in comparison to the rest of the document. Am I doing something wrong? I am pretty new to all this stuff.
ParticipantFurry: 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.
ParticipantWell 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!
ParticipantI'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.
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