Description: Example. Take the following two "lorem ipsum" paragraphs and assume they are long enough for line-wrapping; apply "Drop Caps" paragraph styling: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet... "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...," she said. In both cases the first glyph is DropCapped. The first looks good; the "dropping" applies to the capital-L. It is what the user expects. The second looks poor (or worse); the dropping is applied to the opening quotation mark. It is unlikely (although not impossible) that the user had wanted this; they would generally (although there may be exceptions) want the capital-L to be dropped. I propose adding a tick-box option to the "Drop Caps" part of "Paragraph style" called something like "Skip leading punctuation". If selected, the DropCap operation would skip over leading punctuation characters (the first quotation mark in my example-pair) and take effect at the first real non-punctuation (typically alphanumeric). So both paragraphs would have the "L" drop-capped; the second would retain its opening quotation mark in non-dropped form. Naturally, we would need tighter definitions of "punctuation" here. And I can see that there might be internationalisation and character classification aspects. But initially at least can we focus on the high-level desirability of such an option. Steps to Reproduce: See description. Actual Results: See description. Expected Results: See description. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: See description.
The discussion at https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/130120/10 added a use-case option for *both* the punctuation (e.g. opening quote) *and* the first non-punctuation. This seems reasonable, especially as the main purpose is to add reasonable flexibility options.
LO should always give option to follow requirements of a styleguide like Chicago Manual of Style. See for example https://speakipedia.com/book-design-part-6/ So I would treat it as a valid enhancement request, but let's also ask design-team as a double check.
CMOS 17 recommends to omit the quotation (and to go with normal size/position otherwise). ODF defines in 17.9 <style:drop-cap> "The <style:drop-cap> element specifies if the one or more characters at the start of a paragraph are to be displayed in a larger font and span multiple lines of text." In order to implement this, the ODF style definition needs to be changed (and ideally implemented in all other file formats too since otherwise round-trip export/import operations drop the setting). It would be much easier to define a character style that "reverts" the drop caps and to apply it manually to the few examples. Likewise commented on bug 170006 / bug 170072 that also requests more flexibility for drop caps, I would keep it simple.
We discussed this topic along bug 170006 in the design meeting and welcome such an option sounds given that ODF needs some amendment anyway.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #4) > We discussed this topic along bug 170006 in the design meeting We did not discuss this topic at the design meeting, at all. While the title here has the word "leading", that is not the "leading" text in the sense of bug 170006.
Changed the title so as not to use the term "leading", which is similar to "lead-in", and avoid confusion with the issue of 170006. So, this bug is _not_ about "leading space", in the sense of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading And _not_ about "lead-in text", in the sense of: https://creativepro.com/designing-lead-ins/