Well, I applied the workaround to this book (since it's not illustrated, it's a smaller test file, but it's in Spanish). Could you people try it with different readers? It works fine with Opera here at home.
Things to look at:
All chapters: The drop cap should occupy around 3 lines, the top of the cap should more or less about the same height as the top of the first line. The drop cap should have the same indent as normal paragraphs, there should be some space between the cap and the text on the right, except for the first line (minimal space here). Chapter III is "standard".
Chapters I, IV... : The first line should be moved farther to the left, according to the shape of the A or L.
Chapter II: There must be a space in "A fines" (meaning the space in the first line is a bit larger than in Chapter I). To get this I used "white-space: pre" (and an entity for the space to prevent my text editor to wrap the line and thus add a spurious linebreak).
Chapters XXVII, XXXIII...: Here there is some punctuation before the drop cap. It should be the same font as the normal text, and more or less vertically aligned with the first line (I don't think there is a way to get this exactly without fixing the line-height for the normal text, which I want to avoid). In this case, the "predrop" text is indentend as normal paragraphs, the drop cap goes after that.
Chapter XXIX: Hmm... I'm not sure here... The second paragraph (starting with "--ĦElvira!"), depending on the line width, could begin still to the right of the drop cap, and this is a bit weird. If I wanted to prevent this, forcing the second paragraph to begin below the drop cap, would it be possible?
EDIT: I updated the file, it is now in post #50 (
link).