NOTICE: This project is deprecated in favour of pandoc-latex-extensions.
Lettrine (noun, french): An (ornamental) initial letter larger than the size of the text it accompanies, usually used at the beginning of a section or chapter of a book. Known in english typesetting as a "drop cap".
pandoc-lettrine is a pandoc filter that adds a syntax extension to markdown for drop caps styling. Python is required. You can install the filter using pip install pandoc-lettrine.
In your markdown, wrap the first character of a paragraph in square brackets to mark it for drop caps. For TeX/pdf output you should also put \usepackage{lettrine} in the header-includes field of your file metadata. See demo.md for an example.
Processing demo.md with pandoc -s --filter lettrine gives output in pdf, tex, and html formats. Other output formats can be supported given suitable markup examples.
If you find pandoc-lettrine useful, then please kindly give it a star on GitHub.