Bug 170006 - FEATURE REQUEST: Paragraph styling: capabilities for lead-in
Summary: FEATURE REQUEST: Paragraph styling: capabilities for lead-in
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
25.8.2.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2025-12-16 17:07 UTC by David Lee
Modified: 2025-12-16 17:07 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description David Lee 2025-12-16 17:07:00 UTC
Description:
From https://creativepro.com/designing-lead-ins/

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"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."
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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