Public Domain/Free for Commercial Use Initials?

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David Artman:
It just occurred to me: any method of typesetting initials that doesn't do it automatically, within the style definition, is going to make the first word unsearchable. 99% of the time, this won't matter (many sentences begin with irrelevant terms or articles). But it would matter if you ever wanted to pull the text into another context (e.g., auto-generated glossary or terms; cross-reference that quotes the copy).

I know of no way (other than complex CSS+JavaScript) to replace the first letter of a paragraph with an image, rather than with a different font's glyph. I suspect you'd have to do it manually, in most DTP programs (i.e., anything other than an XML editing environment, e.g., FrameMaker 8+).

Eero Tuovinen:
On the other hand, you wouldn't use very many heavy initials in even a large book. It's no worse than many other routine tasks that need to be done manually.

Regarding search functionality, you could leave the original first letter in place and style it to 0% width and no colour.

But it's true that using images here does break the current layout softwares a bit. No technical reason for it to not be supported (and plenty of uses for being able to equate an image with a string), but it's clearly a functionality that hasn't been considered yet.

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