Chapter 10. First Impressions: Creating Great Opening Paragraphs

THE APPEARANCE OF AN OPENING PARAGRAPH is almost as important as its content for hooking the reader, or, if you are marking a section break, for providing visual relief from a continuous body of text. This chapter looks at initial capitals, specifically drop caps—those created manually and those created automatically using InDesign’s Drop Caps feature.

Drop caps are part of a long tradition of decorative first letters stretching back to before the invention of the printing press. Before printing, books were dictated to, and subsequently copied by, scribes and each book was regarded as a unique treasure. The scribes incorporated individual flourishes to distinguish their work from ...

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