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I came across this recently where, IIUC, the lowercase was superscript while the uppercase was normal or subscript.

What is this style called?

What is this style called

enter image description here

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16

Regardless of how it is achieved, it is called a "drop cap" or "dropped capital."

Your example without any other context suggests it is a sloppy hack to emulate the effect without having proper control of e.g. baseline offset caused by: ignorance; aesthetic choice; lack of software support; all of the above.

Normally, there would be one drop cap at the start of a paragraph only and usually only one per chapter or section. The fact that there are several in-line suggest an aesthetic choice.

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  • You'll be relieved to know that I copied and pasted some text superscript and pasted it into a document and the text was typing out in what you see above. That design is not out there in the wild.
    – 1.21 gigawatts
    Oct 11, 2019 at 23:12
  • +1 for pointing out it should be sparsely used. I find that sentence super-hard to read.
    – Criggie
    Oct 12, 2019 at 19:58
  • 1
    please don't take what I wrote as a complaint. I don't really like it per se, but context is everything. I mean, I grew up looking at xeroxed fanzine from the early 70s and believe me, the ones you see online are the good ones people choose to photograph. Evn so, there was a lot of talent and intelligence and it is not so easy to write off some choices as lack of training. And I love sloppy hacks.
    – Yorik
    Oct 15, 2019 at 14:30

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