This starts with a dropcap.

T
he first letter in this paragraph is big. We used a font size of 36pt, and a height of 24pt. You can change the font size and adjust the height of the drop cap as needed. This drop cap will span a few lines with extra whitespace.

Example 3: CSS Inline Style

This is a little bigger with the line-height adjusted to fit the style.

The first-letter pseudo element can be styled to suit your needs. This is the first-letter in action. We added some style to our first-letter.

Sometimes all we need is a big first letter for a paragraph. No drop cap, just a big cap. It looks best when followed by way too much text.

This is the first big letter.

This is the best size for a pale or transparent font color and it looks good when the paragraph begins with nearly any letter.

With minor changes, just a little tweaking here and there we saw a takeoff that goes like this. The CSS is shortened, which is a good practice when the style sheet starts growing. We keep using the same font family for the examples but other fonts work well too. This one uses Helvetica. If Helvetica is not available on your PC it will use Verdana, and if Verdana isn't available it will use Arial. If none of the fonts are available it will use any sans-serif font. The difficulty in testing is knowing, or wondering, what fonts the visitor has available.