Drop-kick the drop cap
It has been a week of bad drop-cap experiences.
A drop cap is when, at the start of a chapter, the first letter of the first paragraph is extra-large and hangs down two or more lines, forcing the text to indent. There are five distinct problems with drop-caps from a typesetting perspective:
I should note that these are also often problems with stickup caps, too. (A stickup cap is where the first letter is set larger than the main text, but sits on the first line and sticks up, rather than hanging down a few lines.) However, they are a little less of a problem with stickup caps, and thus stickup caps don't make my teeth gnash.
1. What to do with punctuation?
Often a chapter starts with someone speaking, so you have an open quote before the cap. I've seen this solved three different ways:
a. make both the quote and the cap large and dropped (this is my preferred solution)
b. delete the open-quote (I hate this, but I know one managing editor who prefers it.)
c. When the drop-cap is some very fancy typeface that doesn't have a full set of puncutation, you might set the open-quote in the main text font/size, but hanging into the margin. Then set the drop cap. It doesn't look bad, but it's a horrible kludge to typeset. Authors who start with dialogue on one chapter tend to do it on rather a lot more chapters, too.
And what do you do when the paragraph starts with open-quote, ellipsis, and then text? (Yes, sleigh, I'm waving at you, good sir!) On a recent design, we simply didn't drop anything, setting it all as regular text. Because the only reasonable solution would be to have something like "...What did you say?" which looks funny.
2. Funky typefaces. A query came to me today wherein the fantastical/uncial/blackletter drop cap W had an exuberant swash hanging down from it that crashed into the line of text below. Sometimes we can work around this by tweaking the spacing of the words below, but that's really a matter of luck. This business can be more of an issue with stickup caps. Oh, the number of times I've cursed an exuberantly swashy uppercase L!
3. Text snugging. A drop cap is bigger than the neighboring text, so suddenly text that would be next to the bottom of the letter is now next to the top of the letter. This can mean an unexpected gap in the word, particularly if it starts with A or L (and, depending on the typeface, B, D, K, M, O, Q, R, and S). The only solution is to tighten the kerning or tracking on the cap, snugging the next letter closer. However, that can lead to problems with the...
4. Text indent. This is exclusively the provenance of drop caps: what to do with the second (third, fourth) line of text. Often they bang up against the letter, particularly if you're trying to snug the first line of text! The only solution is to kludge with soft returns and tabs. Sometimes I've worked it by setting the drop cap in its own box and then setting a runaround box to manage the text... Ugh. There is no elegant fix to this.
5. One-line paragraphs. What do you do if the first paragraph is but a single line? (Or two lines, but the drop cap is three.) The standard solution is to set the drop cap, and then using kludges set the next paragraph's indent relative to the drop cap. This situation is the reason that all the Raymond E. Feist books I've designed have no drop caps: he starts every chapter with a one-line paragraph of the form "Noun verbed."
The real problem, of course, is that drop caps just look so damn good when they work. It's the times that they aren't working that make me crazy. And when I have a week like this one, where for some reason it was a Drop Cap Problem Solving Marathon, well, it makes me write posts like this.