Optimal Positioning and Sizing for Drop Caps

michele casanova
Posts: 67
What are the best position and size for a drop cap within a font?


I was wondering if there is any standard guideline on this matter or if one of these approaches should be completely avoided.
I usually consider aligning the drop cap above the baseline, treating it like a standard capital letter.

However, in some cases, I have used the full vertical space between the ascender and descender.

0
Comments
-
Aligning to the baseline is probably the best idea, because of the way in which e.g. Adobe InDesign calculates the size and alignment of automated drop caps relative to paragraph linespacing.1
-
1
-
What, no <drcp> feature?
That could make it align to ascender, cap or small cap height.0 -
No need for a new feature for this. There is no reason a type designer couldn’t use 'case' and 'smcp'/'c2sc' for cap and small cap alignment of their drop cap glyphs.
Except they probably already align to cap height by default, and I don’t immediately see a lot of use cases for aligning to the small cap height. (But maybe other folks have different ideas about how to align their drop caps.)0 -
Right. Alternates for those existing features. I wonder if anyone has done that already.
It would certainly make thing easy for typographers, who otherwise end up nudging drop cap size to peculiar fractions of points.
There is also an issue with spacing—which I used to solve (as a typographer) by inserting a space before the capital, setting the drop cap to two characters, and reverse kerning. It would be possible to make the left sidebearing of a special drop cap glyph very small, so that it aligned with body text for, say, a three line drop cap.1
Categories
- All Categories
- 46 Introductions
- 3.9K Typeface Design
- 480 Type Design Critiques
- 558 Type Design Software
- 1.1K Type Design Technique & Theory
- 648 Type Business
- 841 Font Technology
- 29 Punchcutting
- 514 Typography
- 119 Type Education
- 319 Type History
- 76 Type Resources
- 110 Lettering and Calligraphy
- 31 Lettering Critiques
- 79 Lettering Technique & Theory
- 540 Announcements
- 88 Events
- 112 Job Postings
- 168 Type Releases
- 171 Miscellaneous News
- 275 About TypeDrawers
- 53 TypeDrawers Announcements
- 120 Suggestions and Bug Reports