Adding drop caps

In older texts, such as in fairy tale books, we sometimes see the first paragraph in a text starting with a huge letter while the following text flows around it. This design element is referred to as 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 offers a dedicated command for this purpose. Follow these steps:

1. Start a document with any document class. In this example, we’ve opted for the book class. We will use A6 paper size because the recipe is easier 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 introduction}, as follows:

   \lettrine{O}{nce upon a time}, professional writers
   used a mechanical machine called a typewriter. It
   commonly printed fixed-width characters. Emphasizing
   was...