Use drop caps

- [Narrator] Much of the art of design revolves around drawing the eye to where you want the reader to go. And one of the best ways to draw the eye to the beginning of a story or a section is with a drop cap. InDesign lets you easily apply a drop cap to any paragraph. And the most direct path to a drop cap is the Control Panel. I have my magazine document open from the exercise files folder, and I'm going to jump to the previous spread by pressing Option or Alt + PgUp. Now, let's go ahead and zoom in down here to the bottom of my page.

I'll double-click with the selection tool to place my cursor inside that paragraph. And remember, just having the cursor flashing in there is enough. Next, I'm going to make sure my Control Panel is in paragraph mode. I'll come up here and click the paragraph symbol. There we go. And now, I'm going to come over here and set the drop cap value from zero to, say, three. I just typed the number three inside that field, but I could have clicked the little arrow keys to the left of the field. Anyway, when I hit Return or Enter, you can see that I get a drop cap on this paragraph and my drop cap is three lines high.

So, that's great, but this other field, the one to the right, lets me control how many characters should drop down. Right now, it's just set to one, so I'm only getting that letter N. But look what happens if I set this higher. For example, I'll type eight and then hit Return or Enter. Now, both of those words are dropped. Now this is still just editable text. There's nothing special about it. It's just a bit bigger and the text is floating around it. But I can still come over here and select this if I want. Then I could format it or whatever.

For example, I'll come over here and change the formatting of this text in the Control Panel. I'll click the character mode and then I'll make this a little bit tighter by changing the tracking to, say, -50. We can also force it to all caps by clicking this TT button up here in the Control Panel. And finally, let's go ahead and change the color by clicking here inside the text fill pop-up menu. I'll choose this dark gray color. I'll click out here, and you can see that looks pretty good.

But I am seeing that this text down here on that third line is pretty tight. The K and the P are kind of bouncing into each other. So I'd like to move that text away from the K just slightly. To do that, I need to place my cursor just before the word City, the word that's right after the drop cap. It's a little tricky to do that because I have tracking on that drop cap, so I'm going to click after the letter C and then press the left arrow on my keyboard just once. That places the cursor between the drop cap and the word following it.

Now, I'll head up to the Control Panel and increase my kerning value. I'll make this something larger like 100. And you can see, that moved not just that one line but all the lines after the drop cap. Now I'm going to do one more thing to this drop cap. I'm going to change it into what some people call a raised cap. To do that, I select it and then increase its size. I'll choose, say, 14 points. So now these words are both dropped and raised. So as you can see, you can create all kinds of interesting typographic effects with drop caps.

Just let your imagination go wild.