Drop Cap September 2014

[Egg Bramhill]

I knew I had the original somewhere. Here is the charter in full size and the drop cap is at least six times larger than the accompanying text. I just love these old documents created by scribes and monks. How many hours were spent creating them? What if you made a spelling mistake?
Todays equivalant would be a 500 page document spat out by a laser printer in Times New Roman that no one will ever read.

[wizard509]

Interesting Egg, but it looks like they are decorating the entire page in one way or another.

I respectfully submit the following. How much is true is up to you to decide however it is my understanding that a Drop Cap can be the first letter of the first word of a paragraph or could be large enough to maybe be 3 to 4 maybe even 6 lines in height. At least today. I have seen somewhere that it is used as the first letter of a chapter, but, I have never seen that.

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/...ap-typography/

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...001056510.aspx

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012...est-practices/

[iamtheblues]

Here is an example of the drop cap taking up all of the left hand of the page. Taking this to its logical conclusion, I imagine that the text could appear on the recto (right-hand page) of a book, and the drop capital on the facing page, or verso. But I do take Larry's point that usually a drop cap has a depth of seven lines of text.
Bob.

[wizard509]

Whew that is a large one. Too large in my opinion, and defeats the purpose as I understand it.

[wizard509]

3 more. Tweaked to look good at small size.