Small caps are short capital letters that are designed to blend with lowercase text (though they are usually slightly taller than the lowercase characters). Small caps are terrific and highly useful.
The problem is that most people have never seen a real small caps font—they’ve only seen the small caps that Word and WP create by taking regular caps and scaling them down. Any time your word processor starts squishing or stretching type, be worried (cf. condensed vs. squished fonts).
Notice how the scaled small caps (top) are taller and wider than the real small caps (bottom), which are shorter and squarer. Also, the vertical strokes on the scaled small caps are skinnier, giving them a lighter “color” than the other characters. The real small caps have been designed to match the other uppercase and lowercase letters.
If you’re a recent law school graduate, you probably remember that law reviews use small caps for Bluebook-compliant footnote citations to publications and books. Don’t bring this habit to work. Bluebook Rule P.1(b) forbids practitioners from using small caps in citations to publications. Titles are italicized; authors’ names are not.
If you want real small caps, you’re going to have to buy them—they’re not included with the included version of Times New Roman or any other operating system font. But you can get them with most other professional text fonts.
Small caps, like all-caps text, benefit from some letterspacing.
Real small caps are so rare that when they actually show up in a legal document, it’s like a beacon of classiness. In terms of bang for the buck, there are few deals in this website better than small caps. Once you use them, you won’t go back.
But if you really don’t want to buy small caps, can I ask you not to use the small-cap formatting function in Word and WP? If you’ve followed the other lessons on this website and worked hard to make your typography sparkle, I’d feel terrible if you ruined it with those ersatz scaled small caps.
There are OS fonts which have small caps. On OS X, Hoefler Text, Big Calson & Didot have small caps. On Windows Vista, there is Cambria, Constantia & Corbel. On XP or below, however, you’ll be out of luck.
How do you know if a font contains small caps? I have both Mac and PC
Having a font with small caps is one thing. Being able to use them is another. Opentype fonts have small caps built in, but the main Mac word processors can’t use them. Word can’t. Pages can’t, in a consistent manner.
So until the word processors are improved (or the operating system), fonts with small caps don’t accomplish much.
If I’m wrong, let me know. I’ve struggled with this.
True, Word on Windows cannot handle the extended character sets of Opentype fonts, which often include small caps.
Before the days of Opentype, font designers would put the small caps characters in a separate font that was selectable from the font menu. So you’d see “Garamond” and “Garamond Small Caps” on the menu. To use the small caps, you’d select the text and apply “Garamond Small Caps”.
In just about every case, font designers still make small caps available in a separate font, for compatibility with Word and other applications that don’t fully support Opentype. For instance, this page selling Sabon shows the standard Sabon Roman followed by Sabon Roman SC, which has the small caps. That’s how most lawyers will get their small caps. (That’s also why this tip is filed under advanced—it requires a bit of extra labor.)
I use Adobe Caslon. In addition to having it in Opentype, I have it in Postscript Type 1 (from the early 1990s, on 3 1/2 inch disks). I was able to use the separate small caps font when I was using Word on Windows. But I can’t make the small caps font work on a Mac. I tried to convert it, but it didn’t work. So that hasn’t helped
I’d be willing to buy small caps in Adobe Caslon (which I use whenever I can). After reading your note, I decided to check with Adobe to see if they have a a separate Caslon small caps font. I couldn’t find one on the Adobe web site. I called Adobe, and the the guy actually seemed to understand the question, but didn’t know whether they have a separate small caps fonts for Caslon. He will get back to me.
Thanks for your help. I enjoy the site. The subject has interested me for a long time, and it has been a struggle, between bad court rules and lack of software support.
More–
I found Adobe Caslon small caps, in Postscript Mac format, at linotype.com. $26 for the set. So now I’ll be able to use real small caps again.
Thanks.
But when would you use small caps?
I understand preferring them to the ersatz version, but you haven’t provided any guidelines for their use?
You can use small caps anywhere that you’d use regular caps. For instance, I use them for signature lines and footer captions.
Let me mention a point of grammar, if I may. The sentence beginning “As far as bang for the buck, there are few deals” is substandard; it should start in one of these ways: (1) “As far as bang for the buck is concerned, there are few deals” or (2) “As for bang for the buck, there are few deals” — either way is acceptable. (Please forgive my going off-topic, but this neologism is becoming common, alas, and should be decried. Lawyers ought to protect the language.)
You are right, and Garner concurs. Thank you for the correction. (Though let’s agree that all thoughtful English speakers and writers have a duty to “protect the language”. With lawyers, I’ll be happy if they merely “don’t screw up the language more than they already have”.)
So how ’bout using the same font only a smaller size as a poor man’s workaround? Wouldn’t that avoid the squishing of small caps by word processors? In fact, isn’t that pretty much all that small caps as a separate “font” is? My (very) quick test looks very good and natural.
That workaround is essentially equivalent to what the word processor does — scaling the font smaller. (The word processor uses slightly different horizontal and vertical scaling; using a smaller point size will scale the letters the same amount in both directions.)
The problem is the same. The weight of the strokes in the scaled capital letters won’t match the rest of the text.
Considering that a small caps font is about $20-40, you have to be a very “poor man” to prefer the workaround.
I can’t believe you care this much about typography and still use Microsoft Word to typeset your document. What about TeX/LaTeX?
I assume “TT” stands for “TeX Troll”.
I’ve found the default LaTeX classes to be unsuitable for high-quality typography, due to the way it handles line spacing. If you have time to spend developing a class file, you can get extremely beautiful output. And, while Computer Modern Roman is a noteworthy font, I enjoy having a selection of fonts available, which means going through the laborious process of font conversion.
However, I get the impression that the author of this site is targeting people with limited time. Learning TeX, learning LaTeX class authoring and installing fonts is no small endeavour.
Lately I have settled on Adobe InDesign, as I feel it offers excellent typographical options with only a minimal time investment. One of its best features is the seamless OpenType feature access (text figures, all small-caps, etc). I assume other similar products are equally capable (QuarkXPress, perhaps?) but haven’t felt the need to explore further.
I welcome the nonlawyers who visit this site. But my advice will, as the title suggests, be optimized for lawyers.
LaTeX is intended as a typesetting system for math and scientific texts. It’s not a general-purpose word processor.
I agree that Adobe InDesign is great for layout-intensive projects, and I use it for those projects. But I don’t use it for legal documents. Again, it’s not a general-purpose word processor.
Let’s say I don’t want to buy small caps and I don’t want to use the small-cap formatting function in Word. The conclusion is that I have to use all-caps text for words such as NATO, ONU etc. Right? Do I have to letterspacing these short words?
So I’m still confused. If I just bought an OpenType font, can I use small caps on Word for Mac? Should I or should I not use the small caps option in Word in this case? Should I still be looking for small caps-specific font file in my package?
Your OpenType font probably does have small caps in it. However, Microsoft Word doesn’t offer access to small caps in OpenType fonts (if you find that an irritating limitation, I agree).
To use small caps in MS Word, you have to get a separate font with the small caps in the usual A-Z slots, which shows up as its own entry in the fonts menu. This was the usual way of getting small caps before the age of OpenType, so most commercial font vendors offer small caps in this format.
I use Pages on the Mac for most documents. Ostensibly it offers full OpenType support, including small caps. In practice I’ve found it to be finicky. So I use separate fonts.
The good people at Hoefler & Frere-Jones have summarized the status of OpenType support in various programs.
Dear Cantankerous Bastard, I agree that creating a LaTeX style sheet is not something most people should do, however your firm only needs to hire someone to do it once, and then it can be used thousands of times by everyone in your firm. As for OpenType fonts, have you tried XeTeX? It is an extended version of LaTeX with support for exactly that.
Dear MB, TeX is used by some legal firms. I agree that it is not a word processor: I wouldn’t use it for writing personal correspondance. However, it is not just just for scientists, it is a general tool for anyone who wants to have their work look professionally typeset.
The huge benefit of LaTeX is that it allows a division of labor. Your firm hires an expert in typesetting to handle the graphical fomatting, doing the hard work of creating a stylesheet, and hires you, the lawyer, to do what you’re good at, focusing on the content.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but if you have a font with small caps included (i.e. not as a separate font), you can still use them with Word or any comparable program by using the insert > symbol/character menu. Open it and select your font, scroll down to where the small caps are located and select and insert your letters as necessary. It’s a tedious workaround, but it can be done and the results are worth it.
There is a free (and open source) font which have true small caps: Linux Libertine