Small caps

used for emphasis|class=skin-invert-image |class=skin-invert-image In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are letters or other symbols that have the graphic form of uppercase letters but which are typeset at a smaller size, approaching or matching the height of lowercase letters or text figures in the text. For example, the text "The quick brown fox" appears as in small caps. 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. 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.…

used for emphasis|class=skin-invert-image]] |class=skin-invert-image]] In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are letters or other symbols that have the graphic form of uppercase letters but which are typeset at a smaller size, approaching or matching the height of lowercase letters or text figures in the text. For example, the text "The quick brown fox" appears as in small caps. 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. 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, 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.

Computer support

Fonts

The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to small caps by two feature tags, smcp and c2sc . 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 . 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. LibreOffice can use the method.

Word processors

Professional desktop publishing applications supporting genuine small caps include Quark XPress, and Adobe Creative Suite applications. 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. 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 , and version 6.2 added a dialog to switch.

Unicode

In orthography, small caps are allographs of capital letters. Unicode defines a number of small-capital (or, more accurately, petite-capital) characters for specialized use such as phonetic notation. They are deprecated as substitutes for small-cap formatting; rather, the basic character set should be used with suitable formatting controls as described in the preceding sections. The Unicode petite-capital characters are found in the IPA extensions, Phonetic Extensions, Latin Extended-D and other blocks. These characters are intended for use in notation where they are semantically distinct – that is, for cases where they are not allographs. For example, petite capital represents a uvular trill in IPA, and a voiced uvular plosive; capital and have no defined meaning in IPA, but are commonly used as wildcards for 'resonant' and 'glide'. Thus using formatting to replicate would not be appropriate in phonetic notation, because if the formatting were lost, data would be lost and the text would change in meaning. The petite-capital characters defined by Unicode for letters of the basic Latin alphabet are as follows. Shaded cells mark petite capitals that are not very distinct from minuscules in roman typeface, but they may be distinct in italic typeface, as is used in some phonetic notation. * Superscript versions of petite-capital ᴀ, ᴅ, ᴇ and ᴘ are scheduled to be released with version 18 of the Unicode Standard in 2026¹. ** Although the overscript (combining superscript) characters are identified as 'small capitals' in Unicode, there are no corresponding capital overscript characters that they contrast with. § Cyrillic 𞀹 𞀻 𞁀 and ◌ⷡ ◌ⷩ ◌ⷦ ◌ⷮ might be substituted for these letters. Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters and several Greek characters also have petite capitals encoded: * ꟸ is not technically a superscript Ħ, but it is rendered that way in many fonts. There is little call for small caps in Cyrillic, as there would be little graphic difference between small caps and lowercase. However, Unicode does provide for one small cap Cyrillic letter for use in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), where small caps and lowercase are distinct in italic typeface:

Labels

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 is conventionally shown as . 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 . For the latter case, if the font does not have small-cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed. , CSS3 can specify petite caps by using font-variant: petite-caps or font-feature-settings: 'pcap' . For the latter case, if the font does not have petite cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed. For the first case, small caps are substituted.

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