Small caps

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{{Cite magazine |last=Wright |first=Robin |date=July 26, 2020 |title=What Does NATO Do, Anyway? |url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-does-nato-do-anyway |access-date=November 20, 2020 |magazine=The New Yorker}}{{Cite magazine |last=Sorkin |first=Amy |date=June 12, 2020 |title=What the W.H.O. Meant to Say About Asymptomatic People Spreading the Coronavirus |url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-the-who-meant-to-say-about-asymptomatic-people-spreading-the-coronavirus |access-date=November 20, 2020 |magazine=The New Yorker}}—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "{{Smallcaps|nato}}" in small caps.

The initialisms Anno Domini, Common Era, ante meridiem, and post meridiem are sometimes typeset in small caps.{{cite web |last1=Trask |first1=Larry |title=Small Capitals |url=https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/misc/small |website=University of Sussex Informatics |publisher=The University of Sussex |access-date=30 October 2024}}{{cite web |title=9.39: Numerals versus words for time of da |url=https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part2/ch09/psec039.html |website=The Chicago Manual of Style Online |publisher=The University of Chicago |access-date=30 October 2024}}

In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines.{{Cite journal |last=Detken |first=Anke |date=2018 |title=Kursiv Geschriebenes und Kapitälchen: Typologische Überlegungen zu Regiebemerkungen und Sprecherbezeichnungen in postdramatischen Theatertexten |journal=Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik |language=de |volume=48 |issue=3 |pages=522–523 |doi=10.1007/s41244-018-0102-x |issn=0049-8653}}

Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don Quixote. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications.{{cite web |title=15.144: An index with authors, titles, and first lines combined |url=https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part3/ch15/psec144.html |website=The Chicago Manual of Style Online |publisher=The University of Chicago |access-date=30 October 2024}}

In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "{{Smallcaps|Lord}}" is set in small caps.{{Cite book |title=Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary |publisher=Holman Bible Publishers |year=2003 |isbn=0-8054-2836-4 |location=Nashville, TN |page=1046}} Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "{{Smallcaps|Lord}}" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord {{Smallcaps|God}}" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.

In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families.{{Cite book |last1=Jones |first1=S. D. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=G52PDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA5 |title=Vascular Plants of Texas: A Comprehensive Checklist Including Synonymy, Bibliography, and Index |last2=Wipff |first2=J. K. |last3=Montgomery |first3=P. M. |publisher=University of Texas Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-292-72962-9 |page=5 |access-date=2024-03-25}}{{Cite book |last1=Allen |first1=J.A. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aLhMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA208 |title=Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History |last2=American Museum of Natural History |publisher=American Museum of Natural History |year=1892 |page=208 |access-date=2024-03-25 |issue=v. 4}}{{Cite book |last1=Bouchard |first1=P. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-7K9ZeHNih8C&pg=PA896 |title=Family-group Names in Coleoptera (Insecta) |last2=Bousquet |first2=Y. |last3=Davies |first3=A.E. |last4=Alonso-Zarazaga |first4=M. A. |last5=Lawrence |first5=J. F. |last6=Lyal |first6=C. H. C. |last7=Newton |first7=A. F. |last8=Reid |first8=C. A. M. |last9=Schmitt |first9=M. |publisher=Pensoft |year=2011 |isbn=978-954-642-583-6 |series=ZooKeys |page=896 |access-date=2024-03-25 |last10=Slipinski |first10=S. A.}}

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.{{Cite web |last=Bourke |first=Chris |date=April 12, 2007 |title=User's Guide for complexity: a LATEX package, Version 0.80 |url=http://cse.unl.edu/~cbourke/latex/complexity.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200504231437/http://cse.unl.edu/~cbourke/latex/complexity.pdf |archive-date=May 4, 2020 |access-date=May 6, 2021}}

Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g.,

{{interlinear|indent=3

|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 {{Smallcaps|fleece}} and {{Smallcaps|trap}} vowels in English.

The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations.{{Cite book |url=http://www.legalbluebook.com |title=The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation |publisher=Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. |year=2015 |isbn=978-0-692-40019-7 |edition=20th |pages=149}} 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.{{Cite journal |last=Cooper |first=Byron D. |year=1982 |title=Anglo-American Legal Citation: Historical Development and Library Implications |url=https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/1745/ |journal=Law Library Journal |volume=75 |issue=3 |pages=1745– |access-date=2024-03-19}}

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 {{Smallcaps|No-Fault Insurance}}", "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. {{lang|fr|{{Smallcaps|xviii}}{{sup|e}} siècle}} and {{lang|es|siglo {{Smallcaps|xviii}}}} for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone.{{cite book |title=Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'imprimerie nationale |date=March 2011 |publisher=Imprimerie nationale |isbn=978-2-7433-0482-9 |edition=6th |location=Paris |pages=126 |language=fr |quote=On composera en chiffres romains petites capitales les nombres concernant : ↲ 1. Les siècles.}}{{cite dictionary |publisher=Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) |year=1999 |dictionary=Diccionario panhispánico de dudas |title=Uso de los números romanos}}

File:F16-0050 (33360746031).jpg in the 1516 {{lang|la|Novum instrumentum}}]]

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.{{Cite book |last=Vervliet |first=Hendrik D. L. |author-link=H. D. L. Vervliet |title=The Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance: selected papers on sixteenth-century typefaces |date=2008 |publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-041-6982-1 |location=Leiden |pages=36, 47, 52, 71, 75, 79, 202}} Johannes Philippus de Lignamine used small caps in the 1470s, but apparently was not copied at the time.{{Cite journal |last1=Carter |first1=Matthew |last2=Smith |first2=Margaret M. |title=Letters |journal=Bulletin of the Printing Historical Society}}{{Cite journal |last=Carter |first=Matthew |year=1989 |title=Letters to the Editor |journal=The Ampersand |volume=9 |issue=3 |page=2}}

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.{{Cite web |last=Shaw |first=Paul |title=The Evolution of Metro and its Reimagination as Metro Nova |url=http://typographica.org/on-typography/the-evolution-of-metro-its-reimagination-as-metro-nova/ |access-date=21 December 2016 |website=Typographica}} 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."{{Cite web |title=Maxima |url=https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/1843/maxima |access-date=6 October 2020 |website=Fonts in Use}} (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.{{Cite book |last=McGrew |first=Mac |title=American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century |year=1993 |publisher=Oak Knoll |isbn=0-938-76834-4 |edition=2nd |pages=22–23, 258–259}}{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/1923AmericanTypeFoundersSpecimenBookCatalogue |title=Specimen Book and Catalogue |year=1923 |publisher=American Type Founders |location=Jersey City, NJ |pages=334–349, 389–396 |access-date=8 October 2020}})

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.{{Cite web |last=Heller |first=Steven |author-link=Steven Heller (design writer) |title=Jonathan Hoefler on type design |url=http://www.hellerbooks.com/docs/interviews_dialogues.html |access-date=2 August 2016 |website=Design Dialogues}}{{Cite web |last=Gilbertson |first=Alan |date=21 May 2015 |title=The Incredible Shrinking Italic Small Caps |url=https://indesignsecrets.com/the-incredible-shrinking-italic-small-caps.php |access-date=21 September 2020 |website=InDesign Secrets}} 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,{{Cite book |last1=Enschedé |first1=Johannes |title=The Enschedé type specimens of 1768 and 1773: a facsimile |last2=Lane |first2=John A. |author-link2=John A. Lane |year=1993 |publisher=Stichting Museum Enschedé, the Enschedé Font Foundry, Uitgeverij De Buitenkant |isbn=9-070-38658-5 |page=63}}{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ww1NAAAAcAAJ |title=Proef van letteren, welke gegooten worden in de nieuwe Haerlemsche Lettergietery van J. Enschedé |year=1768 |publisher=J. Enschedé |location=Haarlem |access-date=3 June 2020|language=nl}} 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."{{Cite book |last=Adams |first=Thomas F. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7ME9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA67 |title=Typographia: A Brief Sketch of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Typographic Art: with Practical Directions for Conducting Every Department in an Office |year=1837 |location=Philadelphia |access-date=19 October 2023}}{{efn|Spelling and capitalisation modernised.}} (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.{{Cite book |last=Williamson |first=Hugh |author-link=Hugh Williamson (book designer) |title=Methods of Book Design |date=1956 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=London |pages=75–104}} More have appeared in the digital period, such as in Hoefler Text and FF Scala.{{Cite web |last=Hoefler |first=Jonathan |author-link=Jonathan Hoefler |title=Hoefler Text Font Features: Grand Italics |url=https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/features/hoefler-text-grand-italics |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190415181354/https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/features/hoefler-text-grand-italics |archive-date=15 April 2019 |access-date=15 April 2019 |publisher=Hoefler}}{{Cite book |last=Majoor |first=Martin |url=https://www.martinmajoor.com/1.1_scala_article_majoor.html |title=FontFont Focus No.1 |year=2000 |publisher=FontShop |access-date=20 September 2020}}

The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to small caps by two feature tags, smcp and c2sc.{{Cite web |date=2017-01-04 |title="Microsoft OpenType Layout tag registry" |url=http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_pt.htm |access-date=2017-07-29 |publisher=Microsoft}} 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.{{Cite web |date=2008-10-08 |title="Microsoft OpenType Layout tag registry" |url=http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_ae.htm |access-date=2014-05-15 |publisher=Microsoft}} 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.{{Cite web |title=OpenType feature support" |url=http://www.typotheque.com/fonts/opentype_feature_support |access-date=2014-05-15 |publisher="Typotheque}} LibreOffice can use the {{code|1=fontname:pcap=1}} method.

Professional desktop publishing applications supporting genuine small caps include Quark XPress, and Adobe Creative Suite applications.{{Cite web |title=What's OpenType? |url=http://www.typography.com/techniques/opentype/ |access-date=11 August 2014 |publisher=Hoefler & Frere-Jones}}

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.{{Cite web |last=Duffner |first=Georg |title=Design of EB Garamond |url=http://www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/design.html |access-date=11 August 2014}} 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,{{Cite web |title=Release Notes 5.3 |url=http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3 |access-date=29 December 2016 |publisher=The Document Foundation}}{{Cite web |date=18 November 2016 |title=Opentype features now enabled? Documentation? |url=https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/82052/opentype-features-now-enabled-documentation/ |access-date=29 December 2016 |publisher=Ask LibreOffice}} and version 6.2 added a dialog to switch.{{Cite web |title=ReleaseNotes/6.2 |url=https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.2 |access-date=26 February 2019 |website=Wiki |publisher=The Document Foundation}}

{{Contains special characters|Uncommon Unicode|section}}

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. Normal text set with these characters suffers from a number of deficiencies: Some letters, including the standard English letter X, have no corresponding "small capital" character; hard-coded small caps are not generally intelligible to the screen readers used by blind people; nor, typically, is text set using these characters recognized by general-purpose translation or text-searching tools.

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 {{angle bracket|ʀ}} represents a uvular trill in IPA, and {{angle bracket|ɢ}} a voiced uvular plosive; capital {{angle bracket|R}} and {{angle bracket|G}} have no defined meaning in IPA, but are commonly used as wildcards for 'resonant' and 'glide'. Thus using formatting to replicate {{angle bracket|ʀ}} would not be appropriate in phonetic notation, because if the formatting were lost, data would be lost and the text would change in meaning.

File:Superscript small cap W.png

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 have been provisionally assigned for inclusion in a future version of the Unicode Standard.{{Cite web|title=Additional draft repertoire for provisionally assigned code points for Unicode |url=https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24268-n5291-post-17-chart.pdf|publisher=Unicode Consortium|date= 2024-11-26}}

** Although the overscript (combining superscript) characters are identified as 'small capitals' in Unicode, there are no corresponding capital overscript characters that they contrast with.

Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters, several Greek characters, and a single Cyrillic character used in Latin-based phonetic notation also have petite capitals encoded:

File:UPA sc and lc Cyrillic L.svg

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

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 {{unichar|0416|name=none}} is conventionally shown as {{smallcaps all|CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE}}.{{Cite book |url=https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ |title=The Unicode Standard 15.0.0 |date=13 September 2022 |publisher=The Unicode Consortium |page=968 |chapter=Appendix A, Notational Conventions |chapter-url=https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/appA.pdf}}

Small caps can be specified in the style sheet language CSS using {{code|font-variant: small-caps|CSS}}. 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 {{as of|May 2014|lc=yes}}. For the latter case, if the font does not have small-cap glyphs, lowercase letters are displayed.

{{As of|June 2023}}, CSS3 can specify petite caps by using font-variant: petite-caps{{Cite web |date=2018-09-20 |title="W3C Recommendation: CSS Fonts Module Level 3" |url=https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-css-fonts-3-20180920/#font-variant-caps-prop |access-date=2023-06-09 |publisher=W3.org}} 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.

• {{Annotated link |All caps}}
• {{Annotated link |Alphabet 26}}
• {{Annotated link |CamelCase}}
• {{Annotated link |Mixed case}}

{{Notelist}}

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• {{Cite book|last=Bringhurst|first=Robert|title=The Elements of Typographic Style|year=2004|publisher=Hartley & Marks|isbn=978-0-881-79205-8|edition=3rd|location=Point Roberts, WA}}

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{{Typography terms}}

Category:Typesetting

Category:Typography

Category:Capitalization