Capping First n Words of Scene

[Al Macy (aka TromboneAl)]

I've been opposed to fancy formatting because it's just another thing that could go wrong.
OTOH, now that I've switched to Mac (thank you, Mr. Jobs), Scrivener has options to deal with this. One option is the cap the first n words of every scene.
Do you do that? If so, how many words do you cap?

[spin52]

I did that in my first two series after seeing it done in a trad published book. I normally capitalize the first two words, unless one of them is a one-letter word, in which case I do three.

[Al Macy (aka TromboneAl)]

Well, today it seemed to be working for some scenes and not others. I decided it wasn't worth the extra hassle of trying to figure out what was wrong. I turned off that option.

[elleoco]

I like having small caps for the first few words of a scene, and now that I'm using Vellum it has two options: small caps for the first few words of the first line or for the entire first line. I chose the first few words but was not happy with the outcome. Whatever the software is using to choose the first words is inconsistent, and I got one scene with only the first word and others with several. So even though I don't like it as much I've gone to the first line. At least for me as a reader things like that inconsistency are distracting. If I notice it, I start to look for it, and I don't want my readers distracted.

[Casper Valentine]

Hi Al. It's good to see you here. You've helped me with Scrivener on more than one occasion. My preference is to keep the eBook format pretty basic when it comes to text. I added drop caps for the paperback just to spice up a tad.

[RPatton]

Raised caps work well. 2 ems for the first letter of the first paragraph of a chapter and 1.5 ems for anything after a scenebreak. Also, make sure you don't have any indent on these paragraphs.


I rarely like the look of drop caps in ebooks (the kerning in Vellum is atrocious) and Kindles tend to do wonky things to drop caps.