Decorating your text

You can decorate your text by using "Drop Caps".

A drop cap is a large capital letter that "drops" into a text. Drop caps appear at the start of chapters in antiquated books, but you can find other uses for them.

To create a drop cap in Publisher, follow these steps:

• Click anywhere in the paragraph whose first letter you want to "drop."
• Choose Format, Drop Cap.
• In the Drop Cap dialog box, choose which kind of drop cap you want by clicking a box.
• Choose a font from the Font drop-down list.
• In the Lines to Drop scroll box, choose how many text lines the letter should "drop on."
• Keep the O setting in the Distance From the Text box unless you're dropping an I, 1, or other skinny letters or numbers.
• Click OK.

The procedure in OpenOffice.org/StarOffice 6 or later is slightly different:

• Click anywhere in the paragraph whose first letter you want to "drop."
• Choose Paragraph and click the Drop Cap tab
• In the Drop Cap dialog box, click Display Drop Cap, or Whole Word if that is what you want.
• In the Number of Characters box, choose how many characters you want to drop.
• In the Lines box, choose how many lines the character(s) should drop.
• Keep the O setting in the Distance From the Text box unless you're dropping an I, 1, or other skinny letters or numbers.
• Ignore the remaining two boxes, unless you are after a special effect.
• Click OK.
• If you want to change the font of the dropped character, you will need to do that by left-clicking beside it and then right-clicking and choosing Character.
• Apply whatever character formatting you want, including changing the colour of the letter(s) or the background, turning the letter(s) into a hyperlink, and adding font effects, such as shadow.
• Click OK.