LaTeX Cookbook

Starting a paragraph with an over-sized letter

In older texts, such as in books of fairy tales, we sometimes see the first paragraph in a text starting with a huge letter, while the following text flows around it. This is called a drop cap or an initial. We will now use this design for our own text.

How to do it...

We will use the lettrine package, which provides a command for this purpose. Follow these steps:

1. Start a document with any document class. Here, we chose the book class. We will use A6 paper size, simply because this makes the recipe easy to show with little text:

   \documentclass{book}
   \usepackage[a6paper]{geometry}

2. Load the lettrine package:

   \usepackage{lettrine}

3. Begin the document:

   \begin{document}

4. Start a paragraph with the command \lettrine{letter}{further ...