While I understand you have a solution that is working for you, I just wanted to confirm that it should be possible to have a paragraph style under a character style, and to be using a Section Layout that changes the formatting of the text, without the font size of the character style being lost. There must be some conflict in settings somewhere, to be getting that result.
For achieving the result you want:
- The paragraph style should only save paragraph formatting, if that is all you need of it (no indent). It should have neither the font size nor font family checkboxes ticked.
- The character style should have the font size checkbox ticked, obviously, and in most cases the font family checkbox disabled.
With a setup like that, the compiler can still change the font family, if desired, the base body font size, and default formatting (indents for instance). It will not override the formatting that is within the scope of the styled text’s setup. With the above settings for example, even if the section layout calls for 14pt Adobe Garamond Pro, the character style having set the Font size attribute will maintain 28pt, if that is what it was saved to do, but the font family will change to Garamond. If we had ticked the checkbox for saving the Font family, then the rest of the paragraph would switch to Garamond, but not the dropcap—and that might indeed be desirable if one is using a fancy font for that purpose.
But you can see how incorrect settings could create a directive (unintentional perhaps) that overrides the character style’s font size. That ability is there so you can normalise font sizes if you desire.
In many cases that is the easiest approach, yes. I would point out one case where using pure styles, instead of these settings, can be advantageous, and that is when one isn’t attempting to supplant desktop publishing tools with Scrivener. In that case it is best practice to have the first paragraph of a section using a different style, so that you can implement things like indent adjustments or dropcaps, selectively. It’s even a common enough approach that book templates in word processors and DTPs will often assume that is what one will be doing.
But in that case I would not be trying to force a “drop cap” like this at all. Most such tools have a dedicated formatting system for that, as a function of the paragraph style. You apply the style, and the first letter of it drops into the text in a more conventional manner (which Scrivener itself cannot do):
A longer post describing a way of getting the above in a few seconds after compiling.