Using Drop Caps

Drop caps are a nice touch. If you were designing a web site there would be a problem getting something like drop caps to work in all browsers. Fortunately, IE is the only browser you need to concern yourself with since that is the one that Activ uses to display the ebook. So, if it works in IE it will work.

For anyone working with CSS the solution for drop caps is to use :first-letter pseudo-element. I can't say for certain which browsers it works with (if any).

You can find out more here: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#x52

Scroll down to section: 5.12.2 The :first-letter pseudo-element.

Here is another source: http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/primers/css/cssprimer.htm#c10p4

According to this souce it was available in IE 5.5.

If you aren't familar with CSS this is NOT a good place to start.

You have the advantage over me on Word since I never use it to create HTML or special effects that go into an ebook.

What I'd recommend is that you export the section that does work from Word to HTML, then look at the code used to make the drop-cap work. It should be a simple matter of duplicating the HTML code for the each chapter--I say 'should' because I never find anything works as expected in exporting HTML form Word. Then again a lot of people swear by it.