Stylish drop caps with precision control

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Anton

I am new to Scribus and recently ran into some trouble when exporting a PDF. Members of this forum were kind enough to help me solve that problem, and now I feel it's my turn to give something back to the community.

Scribus has a built-in feature for drop caps, but if you want precision control over stuff like different fonts, placement of the drop cap and distances between the drop cap and different lines of the main text, the built-in feature will not do. The solution then is to work with layers and separate boxes.

Let's say I want my drop cap to extend a bit beyond the left border of the main text box -- an aesthetically pleasing feature often found in classic typography. Let's say I also want line one and line two of the main text to have different distances in relation to the drop cap. What I will do then is create a new layer containing two new boxes: one text box for the drop cap, and a rectangular shape to control the distance between the drop cap and the second line of the main text.

Create a new layer
Go to the layer window (Windows/Layers or F6) and click on the plus symbol to create a new one. Make sure that the new layer sits above the other one in the layer hierarchy and that you have checked "Make text in lower layers flow around objects".

Create the drop cap
With your new layer selected, create a text box for your drop cap with the desired font and size and place it where you want it to be on the page. I recommend using Ctrl+Shift+Arrows (Windows users) for precision placement. To make the first line of the main text "connect" properly with the drop cap, you can simply switch back to the original layer by clicking on it in the layer window, and then insert different distances and breaks (Insert/Distances & Breaks) at the beginning of the main text box to achieve the desired result.

Distance between drop cap and second line of main text
Create a rectangle like shown in the attached screenshot and place it where you want it to be. To make the text of the second line flow around it, go to the properties window (F2), click on Form and "Text flow around frame shape". Voilà, the text of the second line will now flow around your shape.

This might not be the most efficient way to go about it, but it will get the job done. Veteran forum members are no doubt already familiar with this type of work and might have even better solutions. Feel free to add to this thread if so. Cheers!