Drop Cap Glitch in Writer, First Letter Does Not Render Correctly

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The Issue

I convert a lot of public domain books from pdf to Writer then back to PDF. Lately I changed my Default font choice to Noto Serif. All was fine until I decided that for one series of books I wanted to use Drop Cap on the first paragraph of each new chapter. Everything was working smoothly until the first word of a Drop Cap paragraph started with the letter J . Drop Cap rendered the letter J as below (1st pic).

The Diagnosis

It did not take long to figure this one out. As I had just recently made Noto Serif my font of choice, it occurred to me that changing the font family might cure my problem. I changed the characters in the first word of my Drop Cap paragraph from Noto Serif to IBM Plex Serif and Voila!, the character looked like the second pic below.: 
  

Fix

Change the font of the first word or the first character of the first word (or for the entire word); or change the default font altogether.

Summary

If you use Drop Cap in LibreOffice Writer and the first letter does not render properly, it's not the fault of LibreOffice, it's the fault of the Font developer. 

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