From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

Create a drop cap style - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Advanced Styles

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Create a drop cap style

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- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show how to incorporate a drop cap character into a paragraph style definition. This is a particular type of nested style. Command spacebar, click and drag to zoom in on the text. Drop caps are useful for chapter openers, article openers, and major section breaks. I'll double click to insert my cursor into the text, and on the Paragraph Styles panel, we see that I have a paragraph style called body first. This is made up of a large drop cap character. This sinks three lines into the paragraph and sticks above it. It's in a different color, a different font style, and is followed by four words in small caps. To recreate this style, I'm going to begin by setting the opening paragraph back to it's parent style, which is body no indent. If I'll be reusing this treatment for opening paragraphs of other feature articles or in subsequent issues of the publication, then it's worth creating a paragraph style so that I can apply these formats with a single click. So let me point out that the components have already been created on the Character Style panel. There is a drop cap style and a smallcaps style. I now just need to incorporate them, or nest them, into a paragraph style. Returning to my Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm just going to scroll my page to the left to give me some room to create a new paragraph style based on the body no indent style. I'm going to hold down option or alt and click on create new style. I'm going to call this Body DC. Then I'm going to come to Drop Caps and Nested Styles, and for my drop caps I want it to go three lines into the paragraph, one character to be effected, and then I'll choose the character style I've already created, dropcap. Note I have a line left edge checked. That's just going to keep my dropcap character flush with the left edge of the text frame. Now I'll come to the Nested Style section. New nested style, and I'll choose my smallcaps character style. Let's imagine that I didn't already have this created. I could come to new character style, and I'll just call it SC in this case. Then come to basic character formats, where I will change it's case to open type or smallcaps, assuming that is that I'm working with an open type font. Click okay, and I now want to apply this through, in my case, four words. Note if I want the whole line effected, I would instead choose a nested line style, and I have a movie about that coming up, and this will apply smallcaps to the whole line regardless of how many words there are on that line. But that's how we can set up a drop cap nested style, so that in the future, to apply that style, all I need to do is just click on that style, and we get three levels of format, the paragraph, the drop cap, and the small caps, which follow the drop cap, all with a single click.

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