Hmmm. don't think we're done yet.
The Evil Empire has a surprisingly elegant solution to the drop cap problem: It's a menu item in Word, and it creates a 1-celled table with the letter (or word) larger, with text wrapping around it to the right. It's undoable/redoable, and it manages all the drop caps' typeface etc with a style.
It works ok in output html, in the epub built by and read in calibre, but not in ADE.
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Here's the code, attached is a pic and the epub:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11 (filtered)">
<title>I</title>
<style>
<!--
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-indent:.2in;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{margin-top:0in;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-indent:.2in;
line-height:115%;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body lang=EN-US>
<div class=Section1>
<div>
<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 hspace=0 vspace=0 align=left>
<tr>
<td valign=top align=left style='padding-top:0in;padding-right:0in;
padding-bottom:0in;padding-left:0in'>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:38.55pt;page-break-after:avoid;
vertical-align:baseline'><span style='font-size:46.0pt;font-family:Arial;
color:black'>I</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial;color:black'>n the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.* And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.* And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that
it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.* And God called the
light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning
were the first day.</span></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Ideas?
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Open Office's solution works more like a real css, but the code it produces isn't modifiable from within Writer, and each one is a modification of the style on-the-fly, so if you were to use it, you'd have to hack the file every place you did it, and the default makes a bad drop cap (in both the html and resultant epub) anyway.
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............Lazy-boy here wants something he doesn't have to hand code......
-bjc