I use OpenOffice Writer to typeset most of my books, because it works well enough, and it’s cross-platform (kinda). I also usually use drop caps of some sort, because studies show that they improve readership. (Believe it or not.) And I’ve been using fixed line-spacing and register-true, because they make the layout look more professional. But there’s an issue with drop caps displaying bigger than I want them to, and I didn’t think I could do anything about it, until I accidentally noticed a paragraph in which the drop cap looked correct.

The paragraph’s style had been manually modified, and it was not using the “Text body chapter-first” style that I had specified. So I dug into the style parameters and finally figured out why it was displaying correctly in that case, and I developed a work-around to deal with the problem in the future.

This is a work-around, not a bug report, because I can’t reliably reproduce the bad behavior—I did try—and I don’t have time right now to delve into it further and figure out how to reproduce it. If you feel like working it out and reproducing the bug, please do submit a bug report to OpenOffice.org.

For now, here’s what I’ve found out. In OpenOffice Writer, when I use Drop Caps with Register-true turned on, in some situations, the first line of the paragraph gets pushed down, and the drop cap expands to fill the empty space. Here’s a screenshot of what I mean, from my dad’s upcoming book Jots & Tittles: