Drop caps and ornamental chapter openings
The first page of a chapter is the only page in a novel where decoration is traditional. It is also the page where a self-published book most often reaches for an effect it cannot carry, and a badly set drop cap is visible from across a room.
The decoration is not the problem. A three-line initial in a historical novel is centuries old and entirely at home. The problem is that a drop cap is two exact alignments and a shape judgment, and switching one on in a word processor gives you none of the three.
What the letter is actually doing
A drop cap is the first letter of a chapter set several lines deep into the text, with the lines beside it cut short to make room. Two alignments define it:
- The top of the letter aligns with the cap height of the first line — the top of a capital in that line. Not the top of the line's slug, and not the ascender of a lowercase
horl, which usually rises a little higher. - The foot of the letter sits on the baseline of the line it drops to. A three-line drop cap rests on the third baseline, not below it and not floating above it.
That is the whole mechanism. Three lines is the common depth in fiction. Two reads tentative, and five starts to own the page rather than open it.
The three things that go wrong
The letter does not line up with the text block. Every following line begins at the left edge of the measure, and so must the initial — optically, not by the letter's own box. Type carries side bearings, and at display size they are large enough to see. A round capital such as O, C or G has to overhang the margin slightly to look flush; a straight-sided H or E sits close to it. Set by the box, the round letters look inset and the whole opening reads as slightly loose.
The letter's own shape leaves a hole. A, W, V, Y, T and J do not fill their rectangle. A dropped A is a triangle, and the text set beside it in the second and third lines has a white wedge sitting above it unless those lines are tucked in under the diagonal. A dropped T or J leaves its gap on the other side. This is the failure that separates typeset books from poured ones, and it is per-letter work: the fix for A is not the fix for W.
The first word fights the cap. Two cases come up constantly. A chapter that opens on dialogue starts with a quotation mark, and a body-size quote floating beside a 40 pt letter looks like an error. Either set the quotation mark large with the letter, or hang it in the margin so the letter still aligns. The second case is a proper noun: drop the E of Ellen and you have left llen sitting in body type, which reads as a typo for the length of one beat. The standard fix is to carry the rest of the word, or the first three or four words, in small caps.
The alternatives, which are usually better
- A raised initial. A large letter sitting on the first line's own baseline and rising above it. One alignment instead of two, no tucking, no hole. It says the same thing more quietly and is much harder to get wrong.
- The first few words in small caps. Three to five words, stopping at a word boundary rather than mid-phrase. This is the most forgiving option in the list and suits almost any genre.
- Letterspaced capitals on the first two or three words, with the tracking opened a little. Formal, and at home in nonfiction where a drop cap would not be.
- Nothing at all, with a good sink. The white space above the first line already announces the chapter. A clean flush-left opening is never wrong in any genre.
In the Interior Formatter. Chapter openings come from the style you pick — Literary, Modern, Genre, Compact or Classic — and each one carries its own sink and its own treatment of the opening line, applied identically to every chapter it found in your manuscript. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
The genre decides this, not taste
Literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and anything with a period setting carry ornament well. Contemporary thrillers, crime, most romance, memoir and nearly all nonfiction do not; a drop cap on a business book reads as costume, and a thriller that opens decorated has set the wrong tempo before the first sentence.
The test is a shelf, not an opinion. If you cannot find a book in your own genre, published in the last ten years, that opens its chapters this way, you have your answer.
Two rules that come with the decision
The first paragraph after a drop cap or a raised initial is not indented — an indent separates a paragraph from the one above it, and there is nothing above this one. Chapter openings and scene breaks covers that rule and why every chapter's treatment has to be identical.
The second: this is a print decision only. An EPUB reflows to whatever measure the reader's device gives it, so a letter sunk to a fixed number of lines cannot be guaranteed. See EPUB and print PDF are two different books.
The sink moves your page count
The sink is the white space above a chapter's first line, and it is one of the few interior settings that changes the length of the whole book. Deepen it and every chapter opener loses lines, which pushes text onto later pages across all forty chapters at once. A longer book is a wider spine and a different cover file, so settle the sink before you build the wrap. How to calculate spine width shows what those pages are worth in inches.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Blank pages, recto and verso, and why the count is even · Also: Choosing a typeface for the body of a book · Parts, sections and the pages between chapters · Running heads and page numbers