typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and ...

, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s that resemble

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

. This is technically not a case-transformation, but a substitution of glyphs, although the effect is often approximated by case-transformation and scaling. 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 In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed tex ...

, or when

boldface In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech. Methods and use The most common methods in W ...

is inappropriate. For example, the text "Text in small caps" appears as in small caps. 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 OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

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 processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

s and text-formatting systems include an option to format

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

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 font sets; but less complex digital 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 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.

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 ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' and ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...

'', is to use small caps for

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

s and

initialism An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

s 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 and stage directions, small caps are usually used for the names of characters before their lines. French and some British publications use small caps to indicate the

surname In some cultures, a surname, family name, or last name is the portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family, tribe or community. Practices vary by culture. The family name may be placed at either the start of a person's full name, ...

by which someone with a long formal name is to be designated in the rest of a written work. An elementary example is Don de La Mancha. Similarly, they are used for those languages in which the surname comes first, such as the Romanization Zedong. In many versions of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

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 Yahweh *''Yahwe'', was the national god of ancient Israel and Judah. The origins of his worship reach at least to the early Iron Age, and likely to the Late Bronze Age if not somewhat earlier, and in the oldest biblical literature he poss ...

'' in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord " represents the Hebrew compound ''Adonai Yahweh''. In zoological and botanical nomenclature, it is common use to print names of the

family Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Ideall ...

group in small caps. In

Computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved ...

, a sub-field of Computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problem, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps.

Linguists Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

use small caps to analyze the

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

and tag ( gloss) the

parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...

in a sentence; e.g., : ''The

Bluebook ''The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation'' is a style guide that prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. It is taught and used at a majority of U.S. law schools and is also used in a majority of federal ...

'' prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations. In many books, when one part of the book mentions another part of the same book, or mentions the work as a whole, the name is set in small caps (sometimes typesetting small caps after transforming to Title Case), not

and not roman type within

quotation mark Quotation marks (also known as quotes, quote marks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an ...

s. For example, articles in ''The

World Book Encyclopedia The ''World Book Encyclopedia'' is an American encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects. ''World Book'' wa ...

'' 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.

Criticism

George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrot ...

's 1856 essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" is critical of Victorian novelists for using excessive small caps and

to indicate unnecessary emphasis."Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"
, The Westminster Review (October 1856), Vol. 66 (old series), Vol. 10 (new series), pp. 442–461

History

Research by Margaret M. Smith concluded that the use of small caps was probably popularised by

Johann Froben Johann Froben, in Latin: Johannes Frobenius (and combinations), (c. 1460 – 27 October 1527) was a famous printer, publisher and learned Renaissance humanist in Basel. He was a close friend of Erasmus and cooperated closely with Hans Holbein th ...

in the early 16th century, who used them extensively from 1516. Froben may have been influenced by

Aldus Manutius Aldus Pius Manutius (; it, Aldo Pio Manuzio; 6 February 1515) was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preserv ...

, who used very small capitals with printing

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

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 Simon de Colines (c. 14801546) was a Parisian printer and one of the first printers of the French Renaissance. He was active in Paris as a printer and worked exclusively for the University of Paris from 1520 to 1546. In addition to his work as ...

Robert Estienne The name Robert is an ancient Germanic given name, from Proto-Germanic "fame" and "bright" (''Hrōþiberhtaz''). Compare Old Dutch ''Robrecht'' and Old High German ''Hrodebert'' (a compound of '' Hruod'' ( non, Hróðr) "fame, glory, honou ...

and

Claude Garamond Claude Garamont (–1561), known commonly as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer, publisher and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal ty ...

. 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 __NOTOC__ The body text or body copy is the text forming the main content of a book, magazine, web page, or any other printed or digital work. This is as a contrast to both additional components such as headings, images, charts, footnotes etc. on ...

of books and so are often not found in fonts that are not intended for this purpose, such as

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...

types which historically were not preferred for book printing. ''Fonts in Use'' reports that Gert Wunderlich's Maxima (1970), for

Typoart VEB Typoart was the only type foundry of East Germany. It was a state-owned enterprise ("Volkseigener Betrieb") located in Dresden. The foundry's most influential art directors were Herbert Thannhäuser (until 1963) and Albert Kapr (until 1987) ...

, 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 Copperplate Gothic is a typeface designed by Frederic W. Goudy and released by American Type Founders (ATF) in 1901. While termed a "''Gothic''" (another term for sans-serif), the face has small glyphic serifs that act to emphasize the blunt te ...

and

Bank Gothic Bank Gothic is a rectilinear geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders and released in 1930. The design has become popular from the late twentieth century to suggest a science-fiction, military, corp ...

, 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 rare. Some digital font families, sometimes digitisations of older metal type designs, still only have small caps in the regular or roman style and do not have small caps in bold or italic styles. This is again because small caps were normally only used in

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 Joan Michaël Fleischman (1707–27 May 1768, german: Johann Michael Fleischmann), was an 18th-century German-Dutch typographer and punchcutter. Fleischman worked in the Baroque period of design and his roman typefaces have been described as ...

. (Bold type did not appear until the nineteenth century.) In 1956,

Hugh Williamson Hugh Williamson (December 5, 1735 – May 22, 1819) was an American Founding Father, physician, and politician. He is best known as a signatory to the U.S. Constitution, and for representing North Carolina at the Constitutional Convention. W ...

'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 Pilgrilm,

Janson Janson is the name given to a set of old-style serif typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period, and modern revivals from the twentieth century. Janson is a crisp, relatively high-contrast serif design, most popular for body text. Janson is based ...

and their release of Monotype Garamond, and from Monotype

Romulus Romulus () was the legendary founder and first king of Rome. Various traditions attribute the establishment of many of Rome's oldest legal, political, religious, and social institutions to Romulus and his contemporaries. Although many of these ...

. More have appeared in the digital period, such as in

Hoefler Text Hoefler Text is an old-style serif font by Jonathan Hoefler and released by Apple Computer Inc. (now Apple Inc.) in 1991 to showcase advanced type technologies. Intended as a versatile font that is suitable for body text, it takes cues from a ra ...

and

FF Scala FF Scala is an old-style serif typeface designed by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor in 1991 for the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The FF Scala font family was named for the Teatro alla Scala (1776–78) in Milan, I ...

/ Scala Sans.

Computer support

Fonts

The

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

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.

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 Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

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 EB Garamond is a free and open source implementation of Claude Garamond’s typeface, Garamond, and the matching Italic, Greek and Cyrillic characters designed by Robert Granjon. Its name is shortening of ''Egenolff–Berner Garamond'' which ref ...

, in open beta.

LibreOffice Writer LibreOffice Writer is the free and open-source word processor and desktop publishing component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfe ...

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

Although small caps are

allograph Allography, from the Greek for "other writing", has several meanings which all relate to how words and sounds are written down. Authorship An allograph may be the opposite of an autograph – i.e. a person's words or name (signature) written by so ...

s of their full size equivalents (and so not usually "semantically important"), the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...

standard does define a number of "small capital" characters in the

IPA extensions IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs ...

Phonetic Extensions Phonetic Extensions is a Unicode block containing phonetic characters used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Old Irish phonetic notation, the Oxford English dictionary and American dictionaries, and Americanist and Russianist phonetic notation ...

and

Latin Extended-D Latin Extended-D is a Unicode block containing Latin characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval transcription and notation systems. 89 of the characters in this block are for medieval characters proposed by the Medieval Unicode Font Initiat ...

ranges (0250–02AF, 1D00–1D7F, A720–A7FF). These characters, with official names such as , are meant for use in phonetic representations. For example, ʀ represents a

uvular trill The voiced uvular trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital letter ''R''. This consonant is one of several collectivel ...

. They should not normally be used in other contexts; rather, the basic character set should be used with suitable formatting controls as described in the preceding sections. As of Unicode 15.0, the only character missing from the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...

is the small-capital version of X. The following table shows the existing Unicode small capital characters from the ISO basic Latin alphabet: Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters, several

characters, and a single

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = Gr ...

character used in Latin-script notation (small capital Л: ᴫ), also have small capitals encoded:

In Unicode standards

The

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

has a typographical convention of using small caps for formal Unicode character names in running text. For example, the name of U+0416 Ж is conventionally shown as .Appendix A, ''The Unicode Standard 5.2.0''

Cascading Style Sheets

Small caps can be specified in the web page presentation language CSS using . For example, the

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...

: : renders as :Jane Doe :AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz. Since the 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 , which is the recommended way, or , which is (as of May 2014) the most widely used way. If the font does not have small-cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed. : : renders as :Jane Doe :AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz ( is exactly equivalent to .)

Computer support for petite caps

Fonts

The

standard 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 Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

applications, as well as

web browsers A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

, can use these features to display petite caps. However, only a few currently do so. LibreOffice can use the method.

Cascading Style Sheets

As of September 2018, there is no specific support for petite caps in web pages using the CSS Fonts Module Level 3 by the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working t ...

, but can be specified by using font-feature-settings: 'pcap';. If the font does not have petite-cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed.

References

External links

A proposal for supplementary characters in Unicode: Medieval Nordic. Subrange 3: Small capitals
at

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative In digital typography, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) is a project which aims to coordinate the encoding and display of special characters in medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet, which are not encoded as part of Unicode. O ...

{{Typography terms Typesetting Typography Capitalization

Uses

Criticism

History

Computer support

Fonts

Word processors

Unicode

In Unicode standards

Cascading Style Sheets

Computer support for petite caps

Fonts

Cascading Style Sheets

See also

References

Further reading

External links