2/27/2023 0 Comments Drop caps in jutohThe examples are in a section near enough to the front of the book that you can see it in the free sample from Amazon. My book, “Anyone Can Make a Kindle Book,” shows (among other things) all of the common text formatting that the Kindle supports. The smaller the font, the worse it looks, and the e-ink models look worse than the Fire. The Kindle handles small caps fine, but the display of them depends upon which model of Kindle and how large you set the font size that you’re reading with. This article originally appeared on CreateSpace on under the title How to Use Drop Caps and is reprinted here by permission. Illustrated capital from the Book of Kells, Wikipedia. In this scheme, the decoration we use on chapter openings offers a welcome relief to the reader, a signal that the subject is changing in some way, and a chance for the author to either make a clean break in the story or continue to unfold the hierarchy of information in the book.ĭrop caps can be a pleasant part of this inter-chapter break and, used with taste, lend another dimension of effective typography to your book design. Running heads help a reader navigate by showing where she is in the book and page numbers provide reference points. Elements that are added to the page need to serve a function. The job of the book designer is to create an environment conducive to reading and engaging with the text. Don’t forget that readers are really interested in your content, not in how pretty your pages look, unless you’re selling books on the visual arts. I don’t think this improves the look of the book. Instead of just using a drop cap at the beginning of the chapters, I’ve seen books where every text break in the book-and I mean a lot of them-had a big, ornate, or very bold drop cap. Lately, I’ve seen some self-published books in which the author got a little carried away with how wonderful these big letters looked. Here we’ll look at the standard type of drop cap and some variations.Įxample using the text font again, this time with a small cap lead-in You Can Also Misuse Drop Caps But there are also lots of other variations including caps that stand above the line (“stand-up caps”) and ones that print in the margin of the book. Most often these drop caps are exactly that: a plain capital letter from the font in which the text is set. When you see that large letter, it physically alerts you that something new is coming. Navigation-A secondary function of the drop cap is to let the reader know a new section of the book is beginning.Decoration-In a book with hundreds of pages of gray rectangles of type, it’s considerate to your reader to give her a bit of decoration once in a while, and drop caps are perfect for that.This will give us a better idea of when to use them and when not. There are only a couple of functions served by the drop cap, so let’s take a look at them. There’s really only one place you should consider using drop caps, and that’s in the first paragraph of each chapter. But like everything else in book design, it’s best to be guided by the long traditions of bookmaking when deciding how to use them. Today, this practice survives in the drop capitals we see at the beginning of chapters. They adapted this practice of using a large initial capital letter at the beginning of a chapter as a way of making their books acceptable to a public accustomed to buying illuminated manuscripts. When printing first began in the 15th century, early typographers wanted to imitate the manuscripts of the day. The monks who were scribes would enlarge the letter to the point that it was big enough to become part of an intricate illustration. When writing out books, they would sometimes treat these first letters as an opportunity for embellishment. The tradition in book design of making the first letter in a paragraph larger than the rest of the type goes back pretty far.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |