[Solved] Color of Drop-Cap in exported PDF

[Harry_Steele]

Hi again.

I've done some work and saved it as an ODF Text document, (odt). I then exported it as a pdf file.

Now, in the original, I had put drop caps at the beginning of a sentence. This covered two lines and had a gray background box around the character. This looked fine. But when I exported it as a pdf, that gray box had gone. The drop cap was still good, but I liked the gray box background.

Am I doing something wrong?

Edit: Changed subject, was Making PDFs.  Make your post understandable by others  -- MrProgrammer, forum moderator

[RoryOF]

The gray background in an .odt file is normally caused by /View /Field shadings being turned on. This colours the field backgrounds (non printing) to tell the user that this is a field. You will need to modify Character Style Drop Caps, Background tab and invoke the use of that style in the Drop Caps formatting of the Paragraph Style in use to get it to print the shading.

[Harry_Steele]

Sorry, Rory; can I ask you to repeat that in a step-by-step order, please? I'm a bit slow today.

[LastUnicorn]

As best as I can see:

1) Highlight/select the character you want to be a drop-cap.
2) In the Character Styles deck double-click on the Drop Caps style — this applies the style to the selected character.
3) Now in the Character Styles deck right-click on the Drop Caps style and select Modify...
4) Click on the Background tab and select the background colour you want from there.
5) Click the OK button to apply.

That works for me.

[Harry_Steele]

Thanks, Uni. I had to also make use of the Fill tool, but eventually I muddled through.

Love this program, but it's never a walk in the park, is it.

Cheers.

[LastUnicorn]

Personally I use LibreOffice, having switched from OpenOffice quite some time ago now. LibreOffice is very actively developed whereas OpenOffice not so. In day-to-day use LibreOffice isn't that much different from OpenOffice, so no culture-shock when doing the switch.

[Harry_Steele]

Well, I'm well and truly behind the times because I thought OpenOffice was the program and LibreOffice was the organisation that created it.....

I'll certainly check it out now. I'm hoping it has a more comprehensive Thesaurus that OpenOffice.

Cheers.

[Harry_Steele]

Okay. It looks good. It has a less "pretty" interface but I'll get over that.

Funny how you get used to the "look" of a page when you're writing "creatively".

The Thesaurus is better, and menus are a bit more accessible.

Thanks again for heads up. I would have completely missed that.

Cheers.

[LastUnicorn]

Thanks for the thanks.

For the English spell-checker which (for some bizarre reason I've never been able to fathom) people refer to as a 'dictionary' then they can be got here:

For OpenOffice: https://extensions.openoffice.org/en/pr ... openoffice
For LibreOffice: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/e ... ctionaries

They both contain the same word lists but are packaged slightly different to suit either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The package is updated every month, usually on the first day of the month. That said, only the English GB/UK speller is regularly updated every month — and the maintainer of the overall English variants package, though not of all the English variants in the package, is the person that monthly updates new words into the GB/UK speller — the other English variant spellers are maintained by other people and can have long wait periods for their maintainers to update them with new words.

Auto update for the speller in LibreOffice is not automatic so would recommend saving the link above and checking monthly for an update version — it sometimes takes a few days for LibreOffice to make the package available so best just to check at the end of the first week of a month.

[Harry_Steele]

Excellent. I'll only be wanting the English GB/UK "spell-checker dictionary", anyway.

Thank you again. Signing off now.

Cheers.