What are drop caps used for?
A drop cap (dropped capital) is a large capital letter used as a decorative element at the beginning of a paragraph or section. The size of a drop cap is usually two or more lines.
What is a drop cap in design?
If you want to add distinction to a document or bring attention to a new paragraph, try using the Drop Cap feature in Adobe InDesign. This allows you to "drop" the text at the beginning of the paragraph, which means making the text larger so it occupies more than one line.
Are drop caps still used?
Decorative drop caps are still sometimes found in publications, however, to give them an extra flourish, but the stylized letters no longer serve a functional purpose. This extra formatting unfortunately impedes the ability of some users to read the text.