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title: Use real small caps; avoid fakes url: http://practicaltypography.com/small-caps.html hash_url: 13cdde344f

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.

.fake-small-caps{ font-family: Equity; }

.shrink { font-size: 72%; text-transform: uppercase; }

.real-small-caps{ font-family: EquityCaps; }

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.)