Small caps

Uses

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—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "" in small caps.

The initialisms , , , and are sometimes typeset in small caps.

In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines.

Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don de La Mancha. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications.

In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "" is set in small caps. Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord " represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.

In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families.

In computational complexity theory, a sub-field of computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problems, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps.

Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g., |She love-s you. |3SG.F.NOM love-3SG.PRS.IND 2|}}

Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the and vowels in English.

The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations. 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.

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" 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. {{Smallcaps|xviii}}{{sup|e}} siècle and siglo {{Smallcaps|xviii}} for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone.

History

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. 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. The idea caught on in France, where small capitals were used by Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne and Claude Garamond. Johannes Philippus de Lignamine used small caps in the 1470s, but apparently was not copied at the time.

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. 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." (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.)

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. 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, 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." (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". Exceptions available at the time were Linotype's Pilgrim, Janson and their release of Monotype Garamond, and from Monotype Romulus. More have appeared in the digital period, such as in Hoefler Text and FF Scala.

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 2026.

** 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:

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 .

CSS

Small caps can be specified in the style sheet language CSS using . For example,

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 . 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.

Notes

References

References

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