Drop Cap outside text frame

[vector]

Does anyone know of a way to set a drop cap slightly outside the left edge of a text frame?

[vector]

hmmmm.... I was a bit hasty on that one. Found a couple of ways to do it if anyone's interested hahah -

- the optical alignment option in Text>Story
- or even better, converting the letter to curves and using text wrap.

Wow, so simple.... :o

[The Repro Kid]

It'd be simpler still if InDesign allowed you set negative first line left indents the way illustrator does, but it does not. :(

[GuyB]

Hi Vector,

You can't do it, like Repro said, because ID does not allow a negative first line indent that goes outside the frame.
But you can do it inside the frame by putting a left indent to all the paragraphs and an identical negative first line left indent to the first paragraph with the Drop Cap.

[vector]

Nice one Guy, definitely the way to do it!

[Lou Wrench]

I have to ask
How do you guys work with measurements like… .3125 inches?
Just wondering.

Lou

[eugenetyson]

Well, it's not that he's dealing with inches. He has his units and measurements set to inches but is using pts when imputting.

i.e., .3125 inches equals 22.5pt

where 72 points is equal to 1 inch.

You can type in any measurement in any of the measurement palletes and insert a 110mm, 10cm, 10 in, 72pt, 100c1 for ciceroes. You don't have to set your units up for inches, you can set them up for any measurement that you want to use or even make your own measurement system.

You can put in centimetres, inches, milimeters, points, picas, cicereos or agates... there are no SMOOTS though :(

in relation to a 72 points being an inch

1 Cicero = 12.79 points

1 Agate is approximately equal to 5 1/2 points or 1/14 of an inch or 1.814 millimeters. (The very small type used for statistical data in the sports and stock sections of a newspaper is agate type. Agate is also the unit of measure used to calculate a column inch in advertising.)

And this is a smoot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot :)

[Lou Wrench]

I suppose 22.5pt is a rounder number for a hanging indent, I would stick to 8mm myself but maybe Mr Smoot had a better idea

[The Repro Kid]

Lou, .3125" is not as frightening or unusual a number as it seems. It is 5/16 of an inch. Not a very unusual number. I tend to work in Picas with type, but some people use inches.

If you can not relate to inches in Decimal format, think of it as change for a dollar.

1/2" equals .5 or 50¢.

1/4" equals half of half an inch, .25 or 25¢.

1/8" equals half of .25, or half of a 25¢, which is 12.5¢ or .0125

1/16 of an inch equals half of 1/8" which is 6.25¢ or .0625

see the pattern?

5/16" is one quarter plus one 1/16:

.25 + .0625 = .3125

[GuyB]

Hi Lou,

I can understand why ,3125 could seem a little bit strange ! The fact is, I only used the default measurements that ID gives when you click on the arrows - it was just faster than typing something like ,3 and since it was just to illustrate the procedure, I left it like that : ,1325 ;)