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Small caps are short capital letters designed to blend with lowercase text. They’re usually slightly taller than lowercase letters.

I’m a big fan of small caps. They’re a great alternative to bold or italic or all caps.

But most people have never seen real small caps. They’ve only seen the ersatz small caps that word processors and web browsers generate when small-cap formatting is used.

Witness Protection | fake
Witness Protection | real
Trixie Argon, Ways to Be Wicked, in Conjuring for Beginners, at 137–39 (London, Quid Pro Books, 2004). | fake
Trixie Argon, Ways to Be Wicked, in Conjuring for Beginners, at 137–39 (London, Quid Pro Books, 2004). | real

Typographers use the word color to refer to how light or dark a text block appears on a page (even if all the characters are black).

Small-cap formatting works by scaling down regular caps. But compared to the other characters in the font, the fake small caps that result are the wrong height, and their vertical strokes are too light. Whereas with real small caps, the color and height have been calibrated to blend well with the normal uppercase and lowercase letters.

Therefore, two rules for small caps:

1. Don’t click on the small-cap formatting box in your word processor. Ever. And don’t use the CSS property `font-variant: small-caps`. Ever. These options do not produce small caps. They produce inferior counterfeits.

2. The rules for all caps also apply to small caps: use small caps sparingly, add letterspacing, and turn on kerning.

Now for the bad news. If you want real small caps, you’ll have to buy them—they’re not included with any system font.

Sometimes, small caps come in their own font file that shows up separately in the font menu. So when you want small caps, you format the text with the small-cap font. Other times, small caps are included in the main font file as an OpenType feature (named ‘smcp’). But either way, you can also use paragraph and character styles to apply small caps, and eliminate the tedium of finding them.

by the way

- With small caps, it’s your call whether to use regular capital letters at the beginning of capitalized words. I prefer not to.

- Both Equity and Concourse have separate sets of small-caps fonts with the letterspacing already baked in. This saves labor. It also allows you to get properly spaced small caps in any program, even those that don’t support OpenType features or letterspacing. (Including web browsers—see letterspacing for more.)