Quote:
Originally Posted by DyckBook
What's with capitalizing a phrase, not a whole sentence or the first line, but just a phrase at the beginning of a chapter. When did that start? Who started it...and have they been put on trial yet? I'd like to testify that it's affecting my mental health.
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Dates from before even etched / engraved plate printing. As do fancy caps and/or a dropped cap. Sometimes the letters after the first letter in the first word use small caps. Small caps are a font face style, not simply the capitals at a smaller size so they don't work on all ereaders either.
All egotistic in printed paper books for over 150 years and slow reading. These form of chapter starts and paragraphs are the more stupid things to copy in eBooks.
In print (and web) you either have a first line indent OR a larger than line space top of paragraph margin. Not usually both. Only the first line indent makes sense on smaller screens (baffles me why the two most common Palm OS ereaders for a PDA do extra top margin rather than an indent).
Occasionally you see ebooks doing first line indent AND extra top margin, which is frowned upon by every major publisher.
We avoid Drop Caps, Illuminated Caps, and small caps in ebooks. We'd only use small caps on paper where that would be in a style guide for an acronym or initials or maybe measurements. Same with fractional spaces.
Regular body would have no paragraph spacing but only a first line indent unless the first paragraph after something centred. Quotes, lyrics, verses etc might have extra paragraph spacing vertically and be having no first line indent but a bigger margin.