Drop Caps with X4

[jclements]

Since X4 does not have a Drop Cap attribute (... hint, hint, Charles), I've been trying to find a work-around which is flexible for text formatting or subsequent reformatting.

This is the best method I could come up with that doesn't screw-up the line space of the text directly to the right on the drop cap.

CHALLENGE: I would like to make this a challenge for everyone to see if they can come up with a better (less steps, easier to edit) method.

[Charles Moir]

The rectangle is not really necessary - just set the drop character to repel and it will work perfectly well in most cases surely? (such as with this N).

[steve.ledger]

Yep - I can confirm this Charles, no rectangle necessary

[jclements]

I believe I found it depends upon the size of the Drop Capital in relation to the line spacing. I think the decender attributes of the repeling character's font is part of the repel boundary.

I may be wrong, but my preliminary experimentation found I had some problems with, in the above example, keeping the 4th line of the text from being repeled. The bottom of the rectangle can be scaled upward to control this.

I'll try testing some more when I get some free time.

[gwpriester]

A drop cap needs more space on the right. I agree with John's method. If you add space to push the text back on the right, as it should be, the text under the cap is often repelled as well. The rectangle lets you maintain the proper spacing all around.

[jclements]

Gary, could you see if the Drop Cap works when used in an HTML Web page?

[PhilM]

The trouble with using the drop cap character as the repelling shape is that it sometimes doesn't keep small characters outside it. For instance, if the drop cap is a "D" you may find the first character of the body text inside the D.

I can suggest a slight tweak to John's method that allows the drop cap to be edited as a normal part of the text:
1. Create your text area and insert some body text (Ctrl+Shift+L for Lorem Ipsum).
2. Create a small white rectangle, roughly the size of the intended dropcap and mark it as repelling.
3. Create a second text area on top of the rectangle and drag it's story link so that it flows in the first text area. [At this stage you'll see some of the body text flow back into the new text area.]
4. Group the rectangle and the second text area.
5. Select the first character and enlarge it to be the drop cap (hopefully pushing all other characters out of the second text area).
6. Drag the group into position above the first text area.

Now as you move the cursor around it moves between the drop cap and the body text. You can even double-click to select the first word, change it's font, etc., etc...

I leave it to you guys to do a graphical explanation of that!

Phil

[jclements]

Hi Phil:

Thanks for the input/suggestion. I gave it a try. For me I found I that after linking the two text areas (aka frames) it was a bear to to enlarge the font of the drop cap ... I had to go back and play with it's frame quite a bit. Maybe I'm not as astute with text frame handling as I should be.


Also, I found some peculiarities with repelling. If I resized the repelling rectangle while it had a no-color outline (I had to select it in wireframe view, then go back to normal view), the text of the second text frame most likely would bounce back to the left ... in particular the second line of the second frame. However, if I gave the rectangle's outline a color again so it was visible and resized it, the text of the second frame behaved itself and when I changed the rectangle's outline back to no-color the text remained repelled and in it's proper place. . . . . Go figure; could there be some more tweeking required for the repelling code?

[OFF TOPIC, but important: OOPS... after rereading I see you used a rectangle with a white fill, I used one with no fill to assure that it would not be seen if the background (page) color changes; however, if I scale it to the right enough it won't repel text properly. So this brings up something else interesting I never considered before. If you change the Page color make SURE YOU DO IT USING A NAMED-COLOR. In the above situation, you would fill the rectangle with the same named-color as the page. Any time the named-color changes, all objects using the named color INCLUDING THE PAGE COLOR will change. Now I'm thinking it would be a good idea to create a named-color called, "Template Page Color", put it to the far left of my color line, drag the color onto the page, and save this as my template.

PowerPoint has a nice feature where you can assign an object a fill which is the Background; it is different than Xara's bitmap fill, however. The object displays the background image or background color no matter what other objects are stacked behind it and it is analgous to a clipview that always displays the background relative to the objects' position on the page. It makes for some neat effects and in many instances IDEAL as a fill for a repel object. If Xara had a fill of "relative to background" it might be useful in Web page design too.