Drop Caps question
 

Just did a flowing text EPub and mobi files. Both look great except for the drop caps which are not aligned right. I have two screenshots, one for EPub and one for the mobi. Was curious how I go about editing correctly so the letter lines up with the paragraph in both files.

thx HI

Please show the code for the first line (the one the dropcap belongs to)
AND
The style sheet entries for all the class used on the line.

Thanks guys, I was able to locate the class for the d caps and then find that in the css, I made the EM a bigger size and it lined up perfectly!

thx

HI

Make sure you test this in a wide variety of devices if this intended for broad distribution. Drop caps is one thing I read about blowing up fairly frequently.

:ditto:

Try different Zoom levels on the device.

Watch out for absolute vs scaleable unit interactions

EG a 16pt font does not scale when zoomed.

(I do tend to ignore issues that only happen at the extremes: Largest or Smallest zooms YMMV)

...and please think of the intended audience. you the author may like them - but I and other customers may hate them, as they make the book harder to read

and like the guys have said, they chances of them looking as intended on all of your customer's devices are not good

I think google will back me up on the readability issue- to my mind these date back to the time of medieval monks doodling their way bored lives away at the book copying desk- when was the last time you saw dropcaps in a newspaper ?

for me they just detract from readability, and since they usually go haywire in a calibre conversion, ( because fonts get rescaled). I just delete them!

further reading
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012...est-practices/

There was also a bunch of dropcap discussion in these three topics (Oldest -> Recent):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=228236
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=229512
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=237323

There were SOME solutions, that might work in most cases... although you can't rely on it working everywhere. A bunch of devices are notorious for breaking (as was brought up, larger/smaller font size, different fonts, changing margins/line-spacing, etc. etc.).

Overall, I would probably say stay away. Go with a Raised Cap instead (which is what we settled on doing over at work as an ok "middle ground"). Although even THAT breaks on some devices (the Nook Touch (?) has a bug where it messes up the line spacing when there is a raised cap).

I remember now - the other reason I remove large 1st letter styles is because I hate seeing that 1st line then a gap then all the the lines normally spaced side effect.
the quoted links say that it happens on Kindles and I know for sure that it happens on Kobo & Sony readers.

Make the 1st character bold if you must, then leave it at that. anything fancier is just bad for readability , and the smaller the device the worse it looks!

It probably does if there's no line-height setting. I usually add "line-height:0" to my raised caps, so they don't disturb the normal line spacing (although that may look bad if the cap is a J, in a font where it has a descender).

This is not a Sigil issue. It belongs in the ePub forum.

FWIW and of no consequence whatsoever, I just saw a drop cap in a Foreign Policy article. FP is a magazine from the same publisher as the Washington Post and Slate. Pretty sure I've also seen them in recent editions of Vanity Fair and Le Monde Diplomatique.

BR

I mastered drop-caps when the Kindle Fire was first introduced, and was very proud of myself for a time. (They don't work on the older Kindles; the thing becomes an up-cap instead.) Then the Kindle team changed the line spacing, to make it more generous, and all those pretty drop-caps were now out of alignment. Considering that if the line spacing were changed once, it might change again, I went back and removed them. Instead I use faux smallcaps for the first few words, 90 percent and bolded. I think that looks good, and it seems to work well across all platforms. (On the older Kindles, it simply defaults to full caps, which is acceptable.)