Raised cap

A raised cap is an opening letter set several times the size of the text, with its foot on the first line’s baseline and the rest of it standing up above the block. Only the first line makes room for it: the letter takes its width out of that line and nothing else, so every line below starts at the left margin as usual. The name reads as decoration but the geometry is the whole term, because the letter’s own baseline is what anchors it, and its cap height is what decides how far into the margin above it reaches.

The word to keep it apart from is drop cap, and the pair is symmetrical. A drop cap sinks below the first baseline, so its foot lands on the baseline two or three lines down and those lines all indent to clear it. A raised cap sits on the first baseline and pushes the line above it up, taking room out of the space over the block instead of out of the block itself. Both answer the same brief, giving a reader a place to start, and they fail differently: a sunk letter mis-set by half a line drifts off the baseline it should be resting on, while a raised letter mis-set collides with whatever is above it.

That difference is why a raised cap is the easier of the two to hold together in a fluid column. A drop cap has to know how many lines it spans, and the number changes with the measure, the leading, and a reader’s text size, so it needs a new size at every breakpoint to keep its foot on a baseline. A raised cap only has to sit on one baseline, which does not move, and only has to be given headroom, which a page can simply reserve. It also asks nothing of the wrap: the first line runs beside the letter and the rest of the paragraph is untouched, so none of the ragged fitting a sunk letter needs applies. Like any initial, it replaces a first-line indent rather than joining one, since the letter is already announcing the start.

In CSS both belong to initial-letter, which takes a size and a sink: the first number is how many lines tall the letter is, the second how many lines it drops. Write initial-letter: 3 1 and the sink is one line, which is the raised cap. The property applies to ::first-letter, so a specimen that needs the letter to be a real element (as the one on this page does, since the stage has to be able to point at it) sizes the letter directly and lets it rise out of a line box of its own, which is the same arrangement stated by hand.