A decorated large first letter at the beginning of a chapter looks nice. Make such an initial in Word yourself.
Insert large initial letter
In many books, the first letter of each chapter is enlarged. Purely because it looks so beautiful. Such a large initial letter is called a decorative initial. This is very easy to do in Word.
- Open Word and type some text to decorate with a large initial letter.
- Click anywhere within the first paragraph.
- Click the tab in the top left of the Ribbon Insert.
- Click in the Ribbon on Text > Decorative Cap. If you don’t see this, it may have a capital letter A icon with horizontal lines
. - A number of options will appear. We choose the latter: Drop Cap Options, because a number of additional settings will appear. This determines the position of the letter, the font, the height of the letter and the distance from the letter to the rest of the text.
- First of all, the position of the letter. If you choose ‘In margin’, the letter will be placed in the margin, to the left of the other text. We choose in text.
- Under ‘Font’, select a desired font. Only do this if you want this font to be different from the rest of the text.
- Determine the height of the letter with ‘Number of lines down’.
- Use ‘Distance to text’ to determine the white space between the letter and the rest of the text.
- click on OK.
- The result appears immediately on the screen. Unsatisfied? Then click again anywhere within the first paragraph, then on the tab Insert > Decorative Cap > Drop Cap Options to modify the letter.
- Want more formatting, such as a different font color? Double click on the letter itself and then on the ‘Home’ tab under ‘Font’ adjust more things, such as the color of the letter.
The video below demonstrates how to create such an initial letter in Word 2013. Other versions of Word may look different, but the functionality is (almost) the same.