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I'm trying to see whether there's a way I can use contextual alternate initial Q(u) in lettrine without its tail colliding with other text. Usinga fontspec's \addfontfeature{Style=Alternate} within the first set of lettrine brackets, I get the following result:

image of initial Q with long tail colliding with other letters

I'd like instead something that looks like the output example added to this question.

Is there a way to fix this? If I understand correctly, lettrine wasn't designed to work with contextual alternates, so I'm figuring probably not, but better to ask people who know much more than I do.

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  • you just need (as in the referenced answer) to choose a suitable linespread don't you? As always, it would help if you provided a test document
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Dec 1, 2022 at 14:59

1 Answer 1

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You can raise the Q or increase linespacing, or both. An example with the freely available EB Garamond which is not such a large Q but collides in the first example but not in the next two.

enter image description here

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec,lettrine}

\usepackage[lf]{ebgaramond}

\begin{document}


\lettrine{Q}{uaesitum}
est de Deo, Angelo et homine. De Deo quaesitum
est et quantum ad divinam naturam et quantum ad naturam humanam
assumptam. Quantum ad DIVINAM naturam quaesitum est: utrum beatus
Benedictus in visione qua vidit totum mundum, divinam essentiam
viderit.

\lettrine[lraise=.1]{Q}{uaesitum}
est de Deo, Angelo et homine. De Deo quaesitum
est et quantum ad divinam naturam et quantum ad naturam humanam
assumptam. Quantum ad DIVINAM naturam quaesitum est: utrum beatus
Benedictus in visione qua vidit totum mundum, divinam essentiam
viderit.


{\renewcommand\baselinestretch{1.1}\selectfont
\lettrine{Q}{uaesitum}
est de Deo, Angelo et homine. De Deo quaesitum
est et quantum ad divinam naturam et quantum ad naturam humanam
assumptam. Quantum ad DIVINAM naturam quaesitum est: utrum beatus
Benedictus in visione qua vidit totum mundum, divinam essentiam
viderit.

}

\end{document}
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  • Thank you! Doing both (raising the Q and increasing the linespacing) solves the problem completely! It does add several pages to the document, but I'm okay with the trade-off.
    – Joel Derfner
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 15:00

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