Optimal Positioning and Sizing for Drop Caps

michele casanova

What are the best position and size for a drop cap within a font?

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.

I was wondering if there is any standard guideline on this matter or if one of these approaches should be completely avoided.

John Hudson

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.

michele casanova

@John Hudson Thanks. LibreOffice probably uses a similar method as well.

Nick Shinn

What, no <drcp> feature?
That could make it align to ascender, cap or small cap height.

Thomas Phinney

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.)

Nick Shinn

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.