Creating decorative drop caps with floating pictures

As you probably know, drop caps are often used at the beginning of a book chapter to grab readers attention. Drop caps can be simple initial letters formatted in a larger font size, or beautiful artwork, like the one below:

If you would like to use graphical drop caps in your documents, you can find many on the Web, both free and paid. Or you can create them yourself with corresponding graphic tools.

If you have a decorative drop cap as a graphic file on your disk, here is how you can add it to a document in Atlantis:

1. Click in the document where you want to insert a drop cap:
   
2. Press the Del key to delete the initial letter in the document that should be replaced with a picture (in our case, the "A" letter of "Alice").
3. If the drop cap image is available on the Windows clipboard, just press CtrlV to paste. If the drop cap image is stored on a disk as a graphic file, use the "Picture..." command of the "Insert" menu, or the corresponding button of the Insert toolbar toolbar to insert your graphic file.
4. Click the inserted image to select it:
   
5. Click the "Picture layout" button of the "Picture" context toolbar, and choose "Square" as a text wrapping style:
   
   
6. Finally, resize and reposition the image with the mouse in the desired way:
   

There are more things you can do with a graphical drop cap.

• You can move the drop cap image in the page's left margin:
  
• You can create an indented drop cap. Just move it with the mouse to the right, then double-click it, and chose to wrap text on the right side only:
  
  
• You can control the distance between the drop cap image and the text. To do so, double-click the image, and adjust the corresponding items in the dialog:
  

You can download the sample document file used in this article by clicking here.

See also...