In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. [1] This is technically not a case-transformation, but a substitution of glyphs, although the effect is often approximated by case-transformation and scaling. Small caps are used in running text as a form of emphasis that is less dominant than all uppercase text, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate. For example, the text "Text in small caps" appears as Text in small caps in small caps. Small caps can be used to draw attention to the opening phrase or line of a new section of text, or to provide an additional style in a dictionary entry where many parts must be typographically differentiated.
Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters and have a wider aspect ratio for readability.
Typically, the height of a small capital glyph will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. In fonts with relatively low x-height, however, small caps may be somewhat larger than this. For example, in some Tiro Typeworks fonts, small caps glyphs are 30% larger than x-height, and 70% the height of full capitals. To differentiate between these two alternatives, the x-height form is sometimes called petite caps, [2] preserving the name "small caps" for the larger variant. OpenType fonts can define both forms via the "small caps" and the "petite caps" features. When the support for the petite caps feature is absent from a desktop publishing program, x-height small caps are often substituted.
Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps, which leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase letters to small caps. How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system; some can use true small caps glyphs that are included in modern professional typefaces; but less complex computer fonts do not have small-caps glyphs, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction (often 1.5 to 2 points less than the base scale). However, this will make the characters look somewhat out of proportion. A work-around to simulate real small capitals is to use a bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems, to match well with the normal weights of capitals and lowercase, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letter-spaced a half point or a point.
Small caps are often used in sections of text that are unremarkable and thus a run of uppercase capital letters might imply an emphasis that is not intended. For example, the style of some publications, like The New Yorker and The Economist , is to use small caps for acronyms and initialisms longer than three letters [3] [4] —thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "nato" in small caps.
The initialisms ad, ce, am, and pm are sometimes typeset in small caps. [5] [6]
In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines. [7]
Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don Quixote de La Mancha. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications. [8]
In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "Lord" is set in small caps. [9] Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "Lord" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord God" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.
In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families. [10] [11] [12]
In computational complexity theory, a sub-field of computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problem, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps. [13]
Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g.,
She
3SG.F.NOM
love-s
love-3SG.PRS.IND
you.
2
Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the fleece and trap vowels in English.
The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations. [14] The practice precedes World War I, with Harvard Law Review using it while referring to itself. By 1915, small caps were used for all titles of journals and books. [15]
In many books, mention of another part of the same book or mentions the work as a whole will be set in small caps. For example, articles in The World Book Encyclopedia refer to the encyclopedia as a whole and to the encyclopedia's other articles in small caps, as in the "Insurance" article's direction, at one point, to "See No-Fault Insurance", "No-Fault Insurance" being another of the encyclopedia's articles.
Among Romance languages, as an orthographic tradition, only the French and Spanish languages render Roman numerals in small caps to denote centuries, e.g. xviiie siècle and siglo xviii for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone. [16] [17]
Research by Margaret M. Smith concluded that the use of small caps was probably popularised by Johann Froben in the early 16th century, who used them extensively from 1516. [1] Froben may have been influenced by Aldus Manutius, who used very small capitals with printing Greek and at the start of lines of italic, copying a style common in manuscripts at the time, and sometimes used these capitals to set headings in his printing; as a result these headings were in all caps, but in capitals from a smaller font than the body text type. [1] The idea caught on in France, where small capitals were used by Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne and Claude Garamond. [1] [18] [19] Johannes Philippus de Lignamine used small caps in the 1470s, but apparently was not copied at the time. [1] [20] [18]
Small capitals are not found in all font designs, as traditionally in printing they were primarily used within the body text of books and so are often not found in fonts that are not intended for this purpose, such as sans-serif types which historically were not preferred for book printing. [21] Fonts in Use reports that Gert Wunderlich's Maxima (1970), for Typoart, was "maybe the first sans serif to feature small caps and optional oldstyle numerals across all weights." [22] (Some caps-only typefaces intended for printing stationery, for instance Copperplate Gothic and Bank Gothic, were intended to be used with smaller sizes serving as small capitals, and had no lower case as a result. [23] [24] )
Italic small capitals were historically rarer than roman small caps. Some digital font families, sometimes digitisations of older metal type designs, still only have small caps in roman style and do not have small caps in bold or italic styles. [25] [26] This is again because small caps were normally only used in body text and cutting bold and italic small caps was thought unnecessary. An isolated early appearance was in the Enschedé type foundry specimen of 1768, which featured a set cut by Joan Michaël Fleischman, [27] [28] and in 1837 Thomas Adams commented that in the United States "small capitals are in general only cast to roman fonts" but that "some founders in England cast italic small capitals to most, if not the whole of their fonts." [29] [a] (Bold type did not appear until the nineteenth century.) In 1956, Hugh Williamson's textbook Methods of Book Design noted that "one of the most conspicuous defects" of contemporary book faces was that they did not generally feature italic small capitals: "these would certainly be widely used if they were generally available". [30] Exceptions available at the time were Linotype's Pilgrim, Janson and their release of Monotype Garamond, and from Monotype Romulus. [30] More have appeared in the digital period, such as in Hoefler Text and FF Scala. [25] [31] [32]
The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to small caps by two feature tags, smcp
and c2sc
. [33] A font may use the tag smcp
to indicate how to transform lower-case letters to small caps, and the tag c2sc
to indicate how to transform upper-case letters to small caps. OpenType provides support for transformations from normal letters to petite caps by two feature tags, pcap
and c2pc
. [34] A font may use the tag pcap
to indicate how to transform lower-case letters to petite caps, and the tag c2pc
to indicate how to transform upper-case letters to petite caps.
Desktop publishing applications, as well as web browsers, can use these features to display petite caps. However, only a few currently do so. [35] LibreOffice can use the fontname:pcap=1
method.
Professional desktop publishing applications supporting genuine small caps include Quark XPress, and Adobe Creative Suite applications. [36]
Most word processing applications, including Microsoft Word and Pages, do not automatically substitute true small caps when working with OpenType fonts that include them, instead generating scaled ones. For these applications it is therefore easier to work with fonts that have true small caps as a completely separate style, similar to bold or italic. Few free and open-source fonts have this feature; an exception is Georg Duffner's EB Garamond, in open beta. [37] LibreOffice Writer started allowing true small caps for OpenType fonts since version 5.3, they can be enabled via a syntax used in the Font Name input box, including font name, a colon, feature tag, an equals sign and feature value, for example, EB Garamond 12:smcp=1
, [38] [39] and version 6.2 added a dialog to switch. [40]
Although small caps are allographs of their full size equivalents (and so not usually "semantically important"), the Unicode standard does define a number of "small capital" characters in the IPA extensions, Phonetic Extensions and Latin Extended-D ranges (0250–02AF, 1D00–1D7F, A720–A7FF). These characters are meant for use in phonetic representations. For example, ʀ represents a uvular trill in IPA, and ɢ a voiced uvular plosive. They should not normally be used in other contexts; [b] rather, the basic character set should be used with suitable formatting controls as described in the preceding sections.
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | |
inline | ᴀ | ʙ | ᴄ | ᴅ | ᴇ | ꜰ | ɢ | ʜ | ɪ | ᴊ | ᴋ | ʟ | ᴍ | ɴ | ᴏ | ᴘ | ꞯ | ʀ | ꜱ | ᴛ | ᴜ | ᴠ | ᴡ | * | ʏ | ᴢ |
superscript | * | 𐞄 | * | * | 𐞒 | 𐞖 | ᶦ | ᶫ | ᶰ | * | 𐞪 | ᶸ | 𐞲 |
* Superscript versions of small caps ᴀ, [41] ᴅ, [42] ᴇ [41] and ᴘ have been provisionally assigned for inclusion in a future version of the Unicode Standard. [43]
Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters, several Greek characters, and a single Cyrillic character used in Latin-script notation (small capital Л: ᴫ), also have small capitals encoded:
Extended Latin | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ꜳ | Æ | (Ƀ) | Ð | Ǝ | Ɠ | ᵷ (⅁) | Ħ | Ɨ | Ʞ | Ł | Ɬ | (И) | Œ | Ɔ | Ȣ | (Я) | ɹ (ꓤ) | ꝵ | Ʉ | Ɯ | Ʒ | ||||
inline | * | ᴁ | ᴃ | ᴆ | ⱻ | ʛ | 𝼂 | – | ᵻ | 𝼐 | ᴌ | 𝼄 | ᴎ | ɶ | ᴐ | ᴕ | ᴙ | ᴚ | ʁ | ꭆ | ꝶ | ᵾ | ꟺ | ᴣ | |
superscript | 𐞀 | * | * | 𐞔 | * | ꟸ | ᶧ | 𐞜 | 𐞣 | * | * | ʶ |
Greek [c] | |||||||||||
Γ | Δ | Θ | Λ | Ξ | Π | Ρ | Σ | Φ | Ψ | Ω | |
inline | ᴦ | – | – | ᴧ | – | ᴨ | ᴩ | – | – | ᴪ | ꭥ |
The Unicode Consortium has a typographical convention of using small caps for its formal names for symbols, in running text. For example, the name of U+0416ЖCYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE is conventionally shown as CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE. [44]
Small caps can be specified in the web page presentation language CSS using font-variant:small-caps
. For example, the HTML
<spanstyle="font-variant: small-caps">Jane Doe</span>
<spanstyle="font-variant: small-caps">AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz</span>
renders as
Since CSS styles the text, and no actual case transformation is applied, readers are still able to copy the normally-capitalized plain text from the web page as rendered by a browser.
CSS3 can specify OpenType small caps (given the smcp
feature in the font replaces glyphs with proper small caps glyphs) by using font-variant-caps:small-caps
, which is the recommended way, or font-feature-settings:'smcp'
, which is the most widely used method As of May 2014 [update] . If the font does not have small-cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed.
<spanstyle="font-variant-caps: small-caps">Jane Doe</span>
<spanstyle="font-feature-settings: 'smcp'">AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz</span>
renders as
As of June 2023 [update] , CSS3 can specify petite caps by using font-variant:petite-caps
[45] or font-feature-settings:'pcap'
. If the font does not have petite cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed.
The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pronounced, most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue, and que.
Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958.
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Phi is the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet.
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and body text.
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
Junicode ("Junius-Unicode") is a free and open-source old-style serif typeface developed by Peter S. Baker of the University of Virginia. The design is based on a 17th-century typeface used in Oxford, England.
Text figures are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the name. They are contrasted with lining figures, which are the same height as upper-case letters. Georgia is an example of a popular typeface that employs text figures by default.
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font, as well as the letters v, w, and z. One of the most important dimensions of a font, x-height defines how high lowercase letters without ascenders are compared to the cap height of uppercase letters.
Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft Corporation in 1996, and it is also used as the font for the logo of Half-Life. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme, succeeding MS Sans Serif and Tahoma. Released free of charge by Microsoft as part of their core fonts for the Web package, it remained one of the most popular body text fonts on webpages as of 2009.
In metal typesetting, a font or fount is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni includes fonts "Roman", "bold" and "italic"; each of these exists in a variety of sizes.
A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph. The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general, they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting. Arrighi's designs influenced designers in Italy and particularly in France.
Linux Libertine is a typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licensed under the GNU General Public License and the SIL Open Font License.
Syntax comprises a family of fonts designed by Swiss typeface designer Hans Eduard Meier. Originally just a sans-serif font, it was extended with additional serif designs.
A subscript or superscript is a character that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps most often used in formulas, mathematical expressions, and specifications of chemical compounds and isotopes, but have many other uses as well.
Metro is a sans-serif typeface family created by William Addison Dwiggins and released by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company from 1929 onwards.
On composera en chiffres romains petites capitales les nombres concernant : ↲ 1. Les siècles.