[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by crutledge

I have come to the conclusion that dropcap and image is a trade-off between pretty and readable and have decided to stay with the "up-cap" which merely enlarges the first letter and has no indent. There is (for me) no stumble in reading the text.

That is exactly what we decided to settle on at work.

The "Dropcap" broke on too many readers (not to mention all the different EPUB reading programs out there), so the typesetter decided to nix it (and decided that a simple Raised Cap would still keep with the "spirit of the original").

As long as your code is very cleanly marked (and you are consistent in your usage), it should be EASY AS PIE to change it in the future using CSS.

Here is an example of one of the books I completed last month + screenshots:

<p class="noindent"><span class="raisedcap">T</span>HIS is a story that began, in so far as it can be said to have an exact beginning, on a dim January day in 1932. Guernsey Cross, the secretary of the Governor, had darted in and out of the cluttered executive office for perhaps the dozenth time in a half hour. The Governor gave an empty dish on his desk a restless push, looked at me earnestly, and said, “Make no mistake about it. I don’t know why anyone would <i>want</i> to be President, with things in the shape they are now.”</p>

CSS:

.noindent {
	text-indent: 0;
}

span.raisedcap {
	font-size: 2em;
}

So if you wanted a Dropcap in the future, you could easily swap raisedcap CSS -> dropcap CSS.