Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ lettrine dropped capitals (dropping text) problem

[Turkurz]

Hello,
I'm having a little problem using the lettrine package.

I wish to drop the capital letter of each chapter for 4 lines. The method seems to be working just fine, when the first paragraph is long enough to wrap the whole first letter. But when the paragraphs are very short, problems occur: overlapping.

BTW, this is text from Tolkien's "The Hobbit".

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[slovene]{babel}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage{bookman}

\begin{document}
    \par \lettrine[lines=5]{F}{}or a long time the dwarves stood in the dark before the door and debated, until at last Thorin spoke:
    \par "Now is the time for our esteemed Mr. Baggins, who has proved himself a good companion on our long road, and a hobbit full of courage and resource far exceeding his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance.
\end{document}

[Montag]

I know it doesn't directly concern your problem, but it doesn't hurt to use the "english" option for the babel-package for english texts.

edit:
I played around a bit and here you go:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage{bookman}

\begin{document}\lettrine[lines=4]{F}{o}r a long time the dwarves stood in the dark before the door and debated, until at last Thorin spoke:\\
``Now is the time for our esteemed Mr. Baggins, who has proved himself a good companion on our long road, and a hobbit full of courage and resource far exceeding his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance.''
\end{document}

[Turkurz]

Wow, you guys are quick to answer, and it's great that it is that way.

I know it doesn't directly concern your problem, but it doesn't hurt to use the "english" option for the babel-package for english texts.

I know; I had the option english enabled, but WinEdt kept returning an error saying "you haven't loaded the option slovene yet". Don't really know how that is possible.

Anyway, when I copy-paste your code into a blank file, ie. there is only your code in the document, it works, though not completely as I would like: it capitalizes the letter O as well. I would like only the F letter to be capitalized.

However, when I copy-paste the text into my file (the whole Hobbit book), the same result occurs as before. Are the loaded packages causing the problem? I have the following preamble:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper,twoside, final]{memoir}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[top=2cm, bottom=2cm, left=2cm, right=2cm]{geometry} %dimenzije strani
%\usepackage{charter}
%\usepackage{mathpazo}
%\usepackage{pxfonts}
%\usepackage{Palatino}
\usepackage{bookman}

\usepackage{memhfixc}
\usepackage{mempatch}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[labelformat=empty]{caption}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{wrapfig}
\usepackage{fancybox}
\usepackage{framed}
\usepackage{lettrine}

Also, for an idea what I want, here is the link to an ebook. I would like my Hobbit book to look (as far as dropped capitals are concerned) just like this book:
http://ifile.it/ofpr3y/tolkien_-_the_re ... e_king.pdf
(you click 'request download ticket' and then 'download')

thank you for your time and effort

P.S. In my code, why did you change " to ``? What do `` really mean? Is it not sufficient to write only " throughout the whole document?

[Montag]

Ey, did you type down that whole pdf-file? Even if you wrote that, I still think you can't post that or actually upload it anywhere. Isn't that damaging some copyrights? Just for the record, I deleted my downloaded version permanently.

Anyway, when I copy-paste your code into a blank file, ie. there is only your code in the document, it works, though not completely as I would like: it capitalizes the letter O as well. I would like only the F letter to be capitalized.

If you checked the code, the "o" was in the second parenthesis or whatever it's called. Just take it out.

In my code, why did you change " to ``? What do `` really mean? Is it not sufficient to write only " throughout the whole document?

IIRC, this is the actual raw LaTeX-code for English quotation marks. I picked it up, I can't remember where exactly, some years ago and have been using this version for English quotation marks ever since.
If you use " or some other way to type quotation marks, they work because LaTeX knows how to encode them because of the inputenc package. But I'm not that sure about that, TXC automatically gives me the LaTeX-code of national version I set in its options, so I haven't given it much thought so far.

For you WinEdt-related problems, I can't help there. I'm using TXC.

Please delete the pdf file.

[Turkurz]

I haven't uploaded or typed anything, I found that file on gigapedia.org, so I have nothing to do with it, except that I have seen it, and thought the dropped capitals look very good. That's it. Oh, and BTW, there are a lot of ebooks on gigapedia.org, most of which I assume are breaking copyright laws...

Yes, leaving the second option of "\lettrine[lines=4]{F}{}or" empty, results in a lower case o, as I requested. Also, "\lettrine[lines=4]{F}{} or" works even nicer, as the texts is justified.

But there is still a problem with very short paragraphs, and I doubt it has anything to do with WinEdt, I just pointed out what program I was using, just in case. But I think WinEdt isn't the problem here.

I can't find anything in the documentation PDF of the lettrine package that would adress this problem. But it seems odd to me, since I only use the most basic command of the package, and it doesn't work as it should.

[Turkurz]

Any help would be appreciated...