How do I insert a clearly bigger first letter?

Could someone please explain to me how I can make the first letter of a text bigger than the rest? I don’t mean it should be a capital letter but one like you can often see in books where the first character is in height as big as, for example, three lines. Thanks in advance x)

This is implemented for “hanging initials”. The first letter then shows up for the defined number of starting lines of a paragraph as if it is an image with setting ‘Wrap Right’.
Go ‘Format’ > ‘Paragraph’ > ‘Drop Caps’ and test.

Looming initials you can get this way by inserting as many hard line breaks (Shit+Enter) as needed. The first one of these lines must not be empty. Insert a space or a tab there, e.g.

(Editing in respect to the comment by @mikekaganski:slight_smile:
The linked-in bug discussion does not mention a workaround as far as I could see. Restricting the expectations in an enhanced version of emphsized initials, I would judge the workaround demonstrated in this attached example as sufficient.
(Created and tested only in LibO V5.4.2!)

(BTW): Posting as ‘community wiki’ may be pleasant modesty. It is not really useful, however:
-1- You never get “karma” needed to be allowed to make attachments …
-2- Experienced users with sufficient “karma” can edit your posts anyway (for clarity e.g.).

Please note that LibreOffice only supports hanging (i.e., extending downwards) initials with its current implementation of drop caps. See tdf#70180 and its dupe for discussion about extending that.

Concerning looming initials I described a workaround that actually works for me in LibO ‘Writer’ V5.4.2.

@Lupp: sure; my comment was meant for those who would like to know where to look for existing enhancement request.

To make things clearer: @Lupp’s answer covers the basic case when you manually format your document, i.e. you must repeat the steps for every occurrence.

Settings can be customised in two locations:

  • in paragraph style tab Drop caps

    There, you define the “characteristics” of the drop caps (how many characters are part of it, the number of lines in the paragraph they will punch, the horizontal distance to the rest of the paragraph and the character style to give to the drop caps (usually, choose Drop Caps since it is intended for this purpose).

  • in character style selected in the previous step (usually Drop Caps)

    You define here the “graphics” attributes of your drop cap (font, color, background). Do not play with size or position as they will adversely affect the result. Size is automatically adjusted according to the number of lines you set in the paragraph style. Position has no real meaning in drop caps because they are supposed to fill the area defined by the number of characters x number of lines; positionning them “manually” will crop the glyphs.

    Like in every rule, there are exceptions. If you dropcap a short (single line) paragraph like a heading, it will not work because the punched area is only one line high. In this case, you are legitimate to set a font size.

From a practical point of view, for experiencing, do the formatting manually with FormatParagraph... but you must do it for every occurrence. As soon as you have several occurrences, it is much better to define a custom paragraph style, say Dropped para with the drop cap set. A really big advantage is you need only modify this paragraph properties to change simultaneously all occurrences. The same applies with character style Drop Caps.

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