I’m a big fan of small caps. They look great and they’re very useful as an 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.
Trixie Argon, Ways to Be Wicked, in Conjuring for Beginners, at 137–39 (London, Quid Pro Books, 2004). | |
Trixie Argon, Ways to Be Wicked, in Conjuring for Beginners, at 137–39 (London, Quid Pro Books, 2004). |
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 too tall, and their vertical strokes are too light. The color and height of real small caps have been calibrated to blend well with the normal uppercase and lowercase letters.
Therefore, two rules for small caps:
Don’t click on the small-cap formatting box in your word processor. Ever. This option does not produce small caps. It produces inferior counterfeits. (Even when you’re using a font with real small caps.)
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 Times New Roman or any other system font.
Sometimes, small caps come in their own font file that shows up separately in the font menu. 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.
With small caps, it’s up to you whether to use regular capital letters at the beginning of capitalized words. I prefer not to.
I deliver my fonts (see mb fonts) with 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.)
After years in the wilderness, the CSS property
font-variant: small-capsis now safe to use. By default, it will access the OpenType small caps in the font—if they exist. Otherwise, you’ll get the same old inferior counterfeits.