Drop Caps Help?

[DNSB]

Other than both books being terrible examples of coding, Shadows of Ecstasy has the coding for a drop cap while War in Heaven does not. Oddly the version of War in Heaven in the epub secion of MobileRead's library does have dropcaps and used header tags for the chapter headers.

In Shadows of Ecstasy, the calibre1 and calibre2 classes set font size to 1.125em and 1.5em respectively while in War in Heaven, the only style applied to the first paragraph sets the top and bottom margin to 1em.

I would also suggest changing the use of pt (an absolute unit) in War in Heaven to a relative unit (em for example).

[RbnJrg]

I don't see any drop cap in Shadows of Ecstasy; I only see raised caps; it's not the same thing. By the way, the xhtml code employed is not the best.
You have raised caps in Shadows because the first letter has the style "calibre1":

.calibre1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
    line-height: 1.2
}

while in "War in Heaven" you have nothing. So, in "War in Heaven", in your stylesheet.css, write at the end the following:

.calibre6 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
    line-height: 1.2
}

and in your .xhtml files, enclose the first letter of the first paragraph of the chapter with <span class="calibre6">YOUR LETTER</span>.

For example, in Chapter One you should have the following:

<p class="calibre2"><span class="calibre6">T</span>he telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no one in the room but the corpse.</p>

[RMOP]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Other than both books being terrible examples of coding, Shadows of Ecstasy has the coding for a drop cap while War in Heaven does not. Oddly the version of War in Heaven in the epub secion of MobileRead's library does have dropcaps and used header tags for the chapter headers.

In Shadows of Ecstasy, the calibre1 and calibre2 classes set font size to 1.125em and 1.5em respectively while in War in Heaven, the only style applied to the first paragraph sets the top and bottom margin to 1em.

I would also suggest changing the use of pt (an absolute unit) in War in Heaven to a relative unit (em for example).

Thanks. I can't take the blame for the coding of War in Heaven! It is pretty much as I found it. I focused on removing scanning artifacts and adding footnotes and annotations. Similarly, the "Raised Caps" were already in the ePub version of Shadows of Ecstasy. Again, my efforts were to clean up the text and add notes. The input here will get me what I need. Many thanks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

That’s a matter of taste don’t you think?

It's testable.

it's ALSO a question of taste.

[RMOP]

Thanks all. This is a very tolerant forum, puting up with fools, if not gladly, at least patiently. I managed to cobble things together so that the book looks much better. At my age and stage, I don't intend to do many more eBooks, so don't expect or intend to master the skills necessary to do this like one really should. But, I'm pleased w what I've got.

[DNSB]

Great to hear that you are happy with your results. For my uses, since I don't like dropcaps, I remove them. For books I am formatting for others or for publication, I tend to go for the looks good over as many devices as possible coding. Even with using all the tricks I've found over the years, you can't please all the people all the time but you can reduce the complaints to a tolerable amount.

[RMOP]

Well, LOL, since I was evidently in my ignorance referring to Raised Caps, and not Drop Caps at all, that might be a different matter. But, what I have shows nicely across all platforms to date. Thanks again.