Small caps are short capital letters designed to blend with lowercase text. They’re usually slightly taller than lowercase letters. (Small caps are used in this book to denote cross references.)
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 generate when small-cap formatting is used.
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.
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.
First off, this is a fantastic site and an even better book. I appreciate the resources you have provided.
Now, my question. I’m a big fan of small caps, but I am often limited to working in Word. Is there any way to access the small caps data from OpenType font files in Word? If not, is it simply not possible to use the small caps of Lyon Text (for example) in the current versions of Word?
Though Microsoft helped invent the OpenType font format over ten years ago, Microsoft Word doesn’t support most OpenType features. If you think that’s odd, you wouldn’t be the first.
The answer is that MS Word users can’t use the small caps built into OpenType fonts, and instead have to use separate fonts with small caps. Some font vendors offer these; some don’t. (I believe Lyon is now available in an “office” version with the small caps separate.) The short answer: Ask before you buy.
I can confirm that Lyon is available in an office version and with small caps as a separate file.
Is it me, or does the ‘O’ in the small caps “Documents” look too small? Perhaps the font used doesn’t have any overshoot ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_%28typography%29 )
I just got the “office” version of Lyon, and it works very well. The small caps are beautiful.
Agree with @Kasper Henriksen on the optical size of the small caps ‘o’. An equivalent example using the Libertine font is at
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s.cybaea.net/files/sc-example-libertine.png
which I think looks better, both in terms of the height and the spaces between the letters (the spacing is too wide for my taste in the example on this site).
(Technical note: example created with c2sc=0&smcp=1 using the Graphite version of the font.)
On system fonts not including small caps: I believe the version of Hoefler Text included with Mac OS X does feature real small caps, though they’re built-in to the font and thereby inaccessible in Word. They appear to work in Apple Pages, though.