Space after lettrine

Question

When using the lettrine package, there are often additional spaces after the small caps:

It can get even bigger than that actually. It seems to me that this is because lettrine uses an mbox to prevent breaking the line, so the spaces inside the mbox are not modified properly.

Is that the case, and how can I get more equilibrated spaces after the small caps?

Note:

Even when only one word is used in the lettrine, the problem still shows up:

Answer 1

\lettrine's second argument is supposed to be just one word. If you want two like your example, use \textsc explicitly.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lettrine}
\usepackage[margin=3in]{geometry}
\begin{document}
\lettrine Q{uel} \textsc{est} le travail de l'Esprit Comme nous
l'avons d\'ej\`a not lateur, etc.
\end{document}

Answer 2

I had made myself a wrapper for the \lettrine command to override the default values. After reading the lettrine manual again, I found out that it was better to override the length in a local lettrine.cfg file.

Then, to override the settings for each letter, I used \LettrineOptionsFor instead of personal macros. These go in a special file as defined by the \DefaultOptionsFile command in lettrine.cfg (that gets quite complex).

These two steps solved my problem.

For example, my lettrine.cfg contains:

\setcounter{DefaultLines}{3}                                                    
%%                                                                              
%% These are *decimal* numbers:                                                 
\renewcommand{\DefaultLoversize}{0.25}                                          
\renewcommand{\DefaultLraise}{0}                                                
\renewcommand{\DefaultLhang}{0.33}                                              
% Define default options per letter                                             
\renewcommand{\DefaultOptionsFile}{optfile.cfl}          

and then optfile.cfl contains:

% options per letter                                                            
\LettrineOptionsFor{A}{slope=5pt,findent=-0.5em}                                
\LettrineOptionsFor{J}{lraise=0.20,nindent=0em}                                 
\LettrineOptionsFor{L}{lraise=0,loversize=0.08,findent=-0.9em,nindent=1em}      
\LettrineOptionsFor{P}{findent=0.1em,nindent=0.1em}                             
\LettrineOptionsFor{Q}{lraise=0.30,loversize=0.15}  

The result for my example is: