- In this movie, I'll show you how to create
this big, red drop cap that appears
at the beginning of this first paragraph.
I'll go ahead switch you over to my document so far,
and I will zoom in on that first paragraph as well.
And now, I'll double-click between the W an the H
in that first word, and I'll select the W
by dragging across it,
and then I'll press ctrl + x, or cmd + x on the Mac,
to cut it.
Then I'll press the Escape key in order to return control
to the black arrow tool.
And I'll ctrl + v, or cmd + v on the Mac,
in order to paste that little letter.
All right, so notice that what we have here
is a single letter of point text.
It's aligned to the left side of its point,
which is going to work out beautifully.
So now I'm just going to move it down to the fourth line
because I want this character to be four lines tall.
All right, now I'm going to select the type size value
up here in the control panel.
And I'm just going to change it to 80 pt
because I happen to know that's going to work.
I'm also going to click inside of the type face field,
and I'm going to dial in Trajan once again,
and this time I'm going to select Trajan Pro.
Not the bold one, just the regular style,
in order to create this big letter W right here.
And now, with the fill active
here inside the swatches panel,
I'll go ahead and click on that dark red fill
R193 G39 B45,
in order to produce this effect here.
All right, now the question becomes
how do we get the text to scoot over
to allow room for the W?
And the answer is to create a text wrap.
Now, you can wrap text directly around a character
by going up to the Object menu,
choosing Text Wrap, and then choosing Make,
at which point you'll get this alert message
telling you that the text is going to wrap around the W.
At which point, you just want to click OK.
But notice that that gives you way too much wrap.
We should just be wrapping the first four lines,
not the first six, as is happening right here.
So I'm going to press ctrl + z, or cmd + z on the Mac,
to undo that change,
and instead, I'm going to draw a rectangle
by selecting the rectangle tool
from the shape tool flyout menu.
And then I'll just go ahead and drag,
from the intersection of these two guides right here,
down and to the right until I see
a width value of 90 pt.
A height of 61 pt is just fine.
And by the way, you'll need your smart guides turned on
to see that little heads up display.
All right, now we don't want a fill or a stroke,
so just go up here to the control panel,
click on the first swatch, and change it to none.
And then, go to the Object menu once again,
choose text wrap, and choose Make.
And that will create a wrap around this rectangle
that's going to effect the text beneath it.
So whatever object is doing the wrapping
has to be on top of the text that it's going to wrap.
And it has to be on the same layer as that text as well.
Now, notice that in addition to the rectangle,
we have a little bit of an offset,
which is represented by the larger rectangle.
I don't want that offset,
and so to get rid of it,
I'll return to the Object menu,
once again choose Text Wrap,
and this time I'll choose Text Wrap Options.
And I'll turn the Preview check box on.
Notice that currently our Offset value is 6 pt.
We want it to be 0,
at which point we'll see the text get closer to the W,
which is exactly what I want.
So I'll go ahead and click OK.
And then I'll press the "v" key to switch back
to the black arrow tool,
and I'll click off the rectangle to deselect it.
And that's how you create a drop cap
using the little known Text Wrap feature
here inside Illustrator.
In the next movie, I'll show you how to wrap text
around an actual graphic.