Drop caps are just one way of kicking off a paragraph and not always the best solution. There are times when drop caps don't work well:
Figure 10.16. Dealing with quotation marks. 1. Because this paragraph begins with a quotation, it is the quote mark that is "dropped." 2. This is fixed by changing the number of dropped characters to two, but there's an unsightly amount of space to the left of the C and the punctuation is too big. 3. The optical alignment of the C is partially fixed by applying Optical Margin Alignment to the story. 4. The punctuation is reduced in size and its baseline adjusted using Baseline Shift. 5. The space between the punctuation and the C is kerned.
Figure 10.17. Dealing with short opening paragraphs. InDesign copes elegantly, bringing the second paragraph up next to the drop cap and maintaining its first line indent. If you find yourself making many such "exceptions," you probably need a different device.
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