Description: From https://creativepro.com/designing-lead-ins/ ---------- "There are a number of typographic techniques that can help draw attention to the content of an article, book, web page, or any important text. The use of a lead-in is one of them. A lead-in is the setting of the beginning of text in a different style or manner from that which follows it." ---------- My own use-case is the absolute requirement for a relatively simple styling: the first letter of each verse in a collection of poems. At a minimum, this is "bold" (each poem is alphabetic acrostic, with successive verses beginning A, B, C, ...). Some additional flexibility (e.g. colour) would also be useful. But this opens a more general issue. In addition to my "first letter" example, several other styling examples exist across literature: "first word"; "first n words", etc. And the manner of user-desired styling can vary; my example was bold; another common one is small-caps. When the house-style is "first n words", the combination of bold plus SmallCaps seems quite frequent. I see that LO Writer offers one specific case: "Drop Caps" (with "first character" and "first letter" options). But I suggest it is highly desirable that we offer a wider range. Naturally, this proposed development would need to consider the interaction with the existing "Drop Caps" mechanism. Thoughts? Offer! If we can get agreement-in-principle, I'd be happy to try to take this forward. Indeed, as I type, I'm setting up VirtualBox to give me a Linux-based VM on which I could then attempt to download and build LO with a view to possible draft coding of the feature. Actual Results: This is a feature request, rather than a bug report. Expected Results: This is a feature request, rather than a bug report. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: See also: * https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/first-letter-styling/129315
You think of a number of characters/words for each paragraph,. This is likely not what a typesetting has in mind with "lead in" that comes with the first paragraph of a section. Drop caps are one possibility, the other is a character style that you manually apply to the lead-in area. Adding another option clashes with the drop caps. Aside from the missing standardization. (In reply to David Lee from comment #0) > From https://creativepro.com/designing-lead-ins/ This is a good use case for bug 170044. I still don't think that enhancing the paragraph attributes or more complexity for drop case is the right way to go.
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Professional layouting benefits from a consistent lead-in and we should support this beyond drop caps. It could be added as duplication to the per-character settings at drop caps with a special styling for n words or n lines of text, and up to the next punctuation. Alternatively we may add lead-in as an additional attribute to the paragraph and not as kind of enhancement to drop caps. This needs standardization by ODF.