Add Elegance to Your Documents with Drop Caps in Google Docs

Drop caps (dropped capital) are a great way to beautify text by making the first letter of a paragraph stand out. Not only it makes the text beautiful but also helps enhance the importance of paragraphs using different indicators. Unfortunately, Google Docs doesn’t have a dedicated drop cap option, unlike Microsoft Word.

Although there is a workaround to this problem by using the Drawing feature of Google Docs. You can create a word art in the Drawing feature of Google Docs and then add it to your document. It will look almost like a drop cap for all intents and purposes.

In this post, I’ll show you how to add a drop cap in Google Docs using the Drawing feature.

Add Drop Cap in Google Docs

If you already have a written document, then you should remove the first letter of the paragraph where you want to drop cap. If it’s a new document, then there is no need to do anything since the letter will be added by the Drawing tool and you can just start writing from there. Here’s what you need to do:

While the text cursor is at the location where you want to drop cap, click on Insert and then choose New from the Drawing option.

Here click on the Actions drop-down menu and then choose Word art.

Now enter the capital letter that you want to drop cap and press Enter key. In my case, it will be the letter “T”.

This will add a colored letter in the drawing area and you can fully edit it to make it beautiful. You can change its color, border color, size, font style, border type, bold, italics, etc. Once you made these edits using the toolbar above, click on Save and Close button at the top-right corner to enter it in the document.

Once added it may not look like a natural part of your text. If that’s the case, click on the letter to select it and then choose Wrap text or In line options to see which one works best for you. You can also manage margin size to manage space between the drop cap and your text.

Furthermore, you can click the three-dots menu and select All image options to further customize the drawn letter using exact measuring.

Final Words

Using this method may not be easier than Microsoft Word’s built-in method, but it’s definitely more customizable. You can fully customize the drop cap look both before adding it to the document and after. You can always click the Edit button after selecting the added drop cap to take it back to the Drawing tool and edit with better tools.