Design philosophy: all information in this web site should be accessible to the intended audience regardless of platform, browser, or size of screen. Graphics are kept to a minimum to reduce download times. If you see a frame or an animated GIF, feel free to flame me mercilessly.

This site uses fully compliant cascading style sheets (CSS). Older browsers should display text in their default fonts, while more recent browsers will all display fully formatted text. (However, the styles sheets will look best viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0 or above.) The site also complies with major accessibility standards.

Colophon

The base font for this page is Trebuchet MS, a free font from Microsoft designed for on-screen readability at small point sizes. The headlines are 32 pt Times bold italic, combining elegance, classical proportions, and compactness.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

Made on a Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia DreamWeaver.

Easy Drop Caps in PageMaker

by Peter C.S. Adams

MORE TIPS

LTHOUGH PageMaker has a "Drop Caps" plug-in, it isn't necessarily the best way to create a drop cap. For one thing, it breaks the affected paragraph into three separate text blocks, making it harder to edit. For another, it ruins the hyphenation in the wrapped lines. And it doesn't give you very fine control over the size of the drop cap or how the text will "wrap" around it.

An easier way takes advantage of the fact that PageMaker can now wrap text around text — if the text block you want to apply a wrap to is grouped. To illustrate how you might use this workaround, consider the following example.

After setting up the paragraph that you want to have a drop cap, select the first character in the paragraph and cut it. Create a new text block and paste it in.


Ordinary text block with one character in it (70 point Poetica Supplemental Swash).		The same text block, after it has been grouped and had text wrap applied to it.

Select the character and adjust the type specs so that it is the size and style needed for the drop cap. Select the text block with the arrow tool, and it should look like to the first example at left.

Now go to the "Element" menu and notice that "Text Wrap" is greyed out. This is because you cannot apply text wrap to a text block. (Why, I don't know, but that's another matter.)

Now in the "Element" menu, choose "Group." Go back to the "Element" menu and you will see that the "Text Wrap" option is now available. Select it, set up the wrap as desired. and click OK. In the second example at left, the text block is now an element with text wrap applied (and extra text wrap points added and positioned for a close fit).

Once you have set up the drop cap as desired, move it into position. Once you release the mouse button to set in in place, you will see the text in the first few lines in the paragraph immediately wrap around the drop cap. Adjust the position of the drop cap and the wrap points until it looks the way you want it. Now play around with the text in the first paragraph, noticing that text flow and hyphenation are unaffected by the drop cap. To alter the text style of the drop cap, just triple click or select and choose "Edit Story" from the "Edit" menu.

After moving the grouped drop cap over the first paragraph, it will look like the example at right. Note the way the first three lines in the paragraph are wrapping around the initial capital. You can move the cap up to form a standing capital, or make it bigger and combine the effects for an initial cap that stands above the first line and has several lines of text wrapping around the bottom of the glyph.

Now print your masterpiece and admire! Our finished example is below:

The finished product

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