New Russian America

The use of drop caps is not only an ancient typographic tradition, in existence before even the typography as such, but also a slick trick to drow in your readers' eyes. A resent study concluded that articles decorated with drop caps are more likely to be read than the ones without.

It was it pursuit of such a method of jazzing the pages up a little that I embarked on a search of the most suited drop-cap solution for Joomla. Surprisingly enough, out-of-the-box extensions allowing reasonable control over more or less automated placement of initials were far from numerous. Luckily, I stumbled upon capDropper by Ewout Wierda before it was unpublished at JED. This was just what the proverbial doctor ordered for my purpose. Unfortunately, this extension supported only English characters — situation not atypical in the English-dominated Internet.

Well, the great advantage of OpenSource software is that anyone with enough wits can adopt and adapt it to their needs with necessary modifications, such as adding support for Russian, which is critically important for my ends. And that's exactly what I did. With a little research and a bit of good fortune, I was able to figure out how to enable this extension convert not only English, but also Russian letters. While I was at it, I also added support for other European languages, apart from the ones using Cyrillic alphabets, such as Polish or Czech, as well as Greek. French, Spanish and all the Scandinavian languages should work fine. I'd like to think I have done reasonable amount of testing for these languages, but not being fluent in any of them but Russian, I totally conceive a possibility that I might have missed some letters. This especially concerns other Cyrillic languages, like Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian. If you find such an omission, please let me know and I'll try to fix that.

Without further ado, here's the installer. Enjoy, but do read the following notes.

 capDropper_v1.5.1.zip 14.23 Kb 28/02/2010, 20:09

• This will install the original capDropper with extended language support plus Russian localization. If you'd like to translate it into the language of your preference, please feel free to do that and use this installer to make one for your language — just substitute the Russian language file for properly named language file of your target language and do not forget to change the .xml file.
• In my experience, it is better to include the CSS class for the drop cap into the template, at least to avoid loading yet another separate style sheet.
• Read and understand the functionality behind the placement of the capdropper command before or after the "Read more" in manual mode.

And, most importantly, have fun!