# Drop Caps Indesign CS3, CS4, CS5 & CS6 Tutorial (HD) CC

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2010-04-05
- **Format:** Video · 9 min watch · transcript available
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/drop-caps-indesign-cs3-cs4-cs5--cs6-tutorial-hd-cc
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct2t5KquDh0

I walk through the basics of creating drop caps in Adobe InDesign CS3 to CS6, demonstrated in CS4. I cover why drop caps are used, how to set them via paragraph options, aligning to the left edge, scaling for descenders, and building a custom vector drop cap with text wrap.

## Key takeaways

- Drop caps draw the reader's eye to the start of a paragraph and are set per-paragraph by placing the text cursor inside it
- The two top-panel paragraph fields control how many lines the drop cap spans and how many characters it covers
- Open Drop Caps and Nested Styles (Alt+Ctrl+R) to access Align Left Edge for neat margins and Scale for Descenders for letters like a capital Q
- Kerning and baseline tweaks are usually needed to tidy a drop cap, and all size settings are relative to the base font size
- For a fancy custom drop cap, cut the letter, create outlines to convert it to a vector, then apply text wrap so the shape isn't wasted; anchored objects keep it tied to the text

## Chapters

- 0:00 Why we use drop caps
- 0:38 Setting a basic drop cap
- 1:45 Aligning to the left edge
- 2:47 Scaling for descenders
- 3:46 Kerning and baseline adjustments
- 4:47 Building a custom vector drop cap
- 6:26 Text wrap and anchored objects

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/drop-caps-indesign-cs3-cs4-cs5--cs6-tutorial-hd-cc

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena