Drop Caps

[ffutures]

My PDF books have mostly used drop caps at the start of every major section, see e.g.
http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff11/planetary.pdf (about 1109K),
a collection of Weinbaum's stories which has a drop cap at the start of each story.

But most of the Victorian / Edwardian books I normally use as source material would have had something much more ornate, see e.g.
http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff8/nesbit.htm
which reproduces the drop cap illustrations used for Nesbit's biography.

I'm thinking that it might be fun to use some legible ornate drop caps for the next book - however, I'd need something that works well with the font I generally use, Albertus Medium, which is nice and clear and has a look I like.

Here's something I've tried with a drop cap font called Kramer, which appears to be freeware:







Does this work for you? If not, which font would you recommend?

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Kramer looks good to me. I remember Albertus as being the Prisoner font :-) (with a few modifications)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's nice and legible, and the underlying letter shape is sans serif which matches Albertus moderately well. The Prisoner font was Albertus but had no dots on the i or j as I recall, may have been other changes I've forgotten.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I think the "e" was modified. I don't remember the lack of dots, but I'm not arguing.

[tregenza.livejournal.com]

Personally I dislike drop caps. It always takes me a moment to piece together the word and that breaks my reading flow.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I often (as in the Nesbit-esque example) have to spend quite a time just trying to work out what the initial letter is, let alone the word. Granted that it's the start of a chapter, so there has already been a break, but I agree that it does make the break bigger.

I wouldn't object too much to the small one as in the example in this post, because I can recognise the initial letter easily. I actually find that less distracting than an alternate method often still used of putting the whole of the first line in capitals.

[gbsteve.livejournal.com]

I like that too.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think it actually looks better than using a giant dropped letter in Albertus. I can't so far find a font that looks better.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I'm not a huge font-wonk or anything, but that looks fine to me. I can easily tell what the letter is, doesn't seem to break the flow.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It isn't too bad a match to Albertus, but it is a lot curvier. Not perfect, but not too bad.