Pity: Medium’s Nice Hidden Drop Cap Trick Fails on Mobile

Image-based drop caps render beautifully on desktop. The Medium app, however, silently drops them — and it took a friend’s raised eyebrow to find out.

A merger of two screenshots, showing the topic issue of the article

A while back, I published a few tips & tricks here on how to squeeze a more visually appealing look & feel out of your Medium articles. => Using nothing but Medium’s own built-in tools (article linked at the bottom).

One of those tricks: replacing a drop cap at the start of a paragraph with an image — so the paragraph opens with a visual, and the text wraps around it:

A — former — screenshot showing the drop cap trick-picture “at work” on front of a text paragraph

Used sparingly, this neatly sidesteps a classic journalism problem known as the “wall of text”. Works cleanly, without affecting text flow or depth.

So I sat down and created a set of custom graphic symbols — a “!” , a “?” , a lightbulb, a “kaboom” image, and a “wise Apache” figure — to visually flag anything important.

An overview showing my drop cap trick-pictures I made

It worked beautifully, exactly as intended. A little playful — because even highly technical articles can use some breathing room, as long as you don’t overdo it.

Then a friend mentioned, almost in passing, that my Medium texts had lately been starting paragraphs with “AA”, “WW”, or “OO” — and showed me one of my articles in the Medium app on his phone.

Not a trace of the carefully — if not painstakingly, but certainly deliberately — placed graphic replacements.

Medium doesn’t render these images on mobile!

Medium’s format is already so proprietary that I once built my own Markdown-to-Medium converter just to translate .md files into Medium's complex regex patterns.

[embed]Markdown-to-Medium Converter: Browser-Based Formatting for Medium Posts A common problem: When an article written in Markdown is pasted into Medium, formatting issues often occur. Spacing is…medium.com

On PC, desktop, or Mac, the images display without issue — it can’t take more than a few lines of CSS to also render them in a smaller version on mobile, can it?

I’m flagging this directly to Medium as well. Whether or when anything will change — and whether those images will eventually render on mobile too — is anybody’s guess.

In the meantime: a quick heads-up for anyone who likes to put a little care into how their articles look. Plain and generic is easy — and frankly, that’s how most texts end up reading, too.

Here’s the link to the arcticle concerning about some stylistic features Medium is offering out-of-the box — but nearly noone uses them — because noone knows about it!

[embed]📓 Boost Your Medium Posts With Stunning Layout Features! Captivate Readers With Smart Design Using Medium’s Onboard-Tools! Tips for Beginners and Beyondmedium.com

Disclaimer

This text was written by hand completly as a draft in German.

Then the original German version was translated to English by Claude, with the only prompt-order to keep my style and flow consistent in the English version.