The hymn numbers want to be twice as big and the text, so it seemed like a 2-line drop cap whole word might work… but since each poetic line of the text wants to be outdented, there are several problems:
There must be a space between the number and the first word, which perturbs the formatting, as a wrapped second line winds up further left than the first line of text.
The above can be cured by using a multi-character drop cap and omitting the space after the last digit.
However…
If the first poetic line is short, the drop cap feature dosen’t produce a drop cap. The desired effect in this case would be to have the second line of lyrics start to the right of the drop cap, immediately under the text of the first line of text. This effect can be produced by joining the first two lines with Shift-Enter instead of a separate paragraph. But now the data has to dependent on the particular column width, so it can’t quickly be reformatted to a different page size without examining and possibly adjusting the paragraph separation technique for the first two lines of lyrics for each different page size.
On the other hand, if the first poetic line is long, the drop cap happens, and the line wraps, with the text to the right of the drop cap (and a third wrapped line is indented below the drop cap). But in this case, to distinguish from the first case, the desired effect would be to have the second wrapped line indented to the right of the text on the first line. This doesn’t happen, because the drop cap number has already consumed the indent.
So then maybe a text box would work? That is a lot more fussy to create, and the size has to be manually adjusted to the size of the number, which will have different digits and different numbers of digits from one hymn to the next. The wrapping of lyric text to the right of the text box seems to work as desired.
I was hoping to paste in text from a plain text file (which already exists), and just assign a standard paragraph style, and then a special one for the first line of a new hymn that would cause the number to be formatted as desired (large, drop-cap-word-like), but unless someone can give me some clues to easily convert the hymn number to a text box containing the hymn number, and apply a style and make it the right size in some quick manner, this is going to turn into a huge amount of labor, as it is even tricky to select the text inside a text box instead of the whole box being selected, making it hard to apply the text style to the number.
Presently running LO 7.1.8.1 but could upgrade if it helps. On Windows 10, but planning to migrate to Linux when my new computer gets here.
The text file contains hymn numbers before the first line of the first verse, and verse numbers before the first line of other verses. The verse numbers are no problem, just a different style with different indentation for the first line.
I’m not familiar enough with markdown to put a sample in here, will try to post a picture.
