Aligning Drop Capitals

When Roger sent me the text which was the stimulus to all this, I just wondered whether it wouldn't really preferable to have the top of the drop caps level with the top of the first row of text ...

I saw that the PDF document he sent me had been made from an HTML file, and I don't quite understand what advantages HTML might have at any stage in a design that was going to end up on paper, unless you perhaps don't know the size from the beginning; but one way or another you can usually get HTML to align a drop cap, and I suppose even a programme as clumsy as Word - if that's what you used to create it - must allow you to place a floating graphic object where you want it ... ?

For HTML, I think I would probably do the capitals in Photoshop, insert them as images and specify align=left and horizontal space=6: