These are not traditionally part of many fonts, but they can be extremely useful. Unless there is some reason to emphasize the initial caps (if they make a commonly used acronym, for instance), why capitalize the initial letters? (And it looks especially bad, as you’ve shown, when fake small caps are being generated.)Ģ) When you’re deciding on the fonts to use for a job, and you want small caps, look at the content to see whether you’re going to need *italic* small caps. Most of the time, small caps by themselves will be more effective. Thanks, Ilene, for this good reminder of what small caps are and how and why to use them.ġ) There is rarely a good reason to use initial caps with small caps (“caps and small caps”). Then if you apply small caps in a font that doesn’t have them, the result will look like all caps. In Advanced Type preferences, change the Small Cap value to 100%. Just know ahead of time if you need small caps for a project, and only select fonts that have them.Īnother way to head off this problem is to change InDesign’s preferences so it doesn’t make fake small caps. This is considered a type crime, and it’s easily avoidable nowadays since so many OpenType fonts have true-draw small caps. They will look too light, too tight, and often too narrow. If you do, you’ll get fake, computer-generated small caps that are just reduced capital letterforms. Beware of fake small capsĭon’t use the Small Cap option in a font that doesn’t have true-drawn small caps. If you want both caps and lowercase to be converted to small caps, then go to the panel menu and choose OpenType > All Small Caps. Alter the upper/lower case of words, phrases or more.
If you just want the lowercase characters converted to small caps and the full caps (if any) to remain as is, then select the text, and choose Small Caps from the Character panel menu. Change Case options in Word, like many Word features goes beyond the obvious choices on the ribbon. Once you know that true small caps are included in a font, there are two ways to apply them. Note that both do slightly different things, as noted in the article.
This tutorial will show how to change caps to lowercase in Word as well as some other capitalization features. In InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator look in the Glyphs panel where small caps often appear under the subset Small Capitals From Capitals.īoth the Small Caps and the OpenType All Small Caps options are located in the Character Panel menu. Word makes it very easy to change the case of word or sentence. There are a couple of ways to find real small caps in Adobe Creative Cloud software.
2) Another way is to understand how the software interface works and look for them that way, described below for InDesign. There are a couple of ways to do this: 1) In InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator, look in the Glyphs panel where they often appear under the subset Small Capitals From Capitals. While Small Caps changes the entire selected text to smaller variations of capital letters other than the first character of a word, All Caps is similar to the UPPERCASE option within the Change Case drop-down gallery. So you should check for them before purchasing a font, and know how to find them in the fonts you already own. Figure 7, below shows samples of the text applied with Small Caps and All Caps options.
This does not mean that all OpenType fonts contain small caps. Then, drag the small square at the bottom-right corner of the cell down to the final row. To apply this change to the entire column, click the cell containing the uppercase letters to select it. The first cell of your original data column is now converted to uppercase letters. In some cases, separate fonts were created for these older formats to include small caps and other desirable glyphs, but most did not have them at all. Press the Enter or Return key on your keyboard to apply the formula. To the contrary, the older Type 1 and TrueType font formats have a very limited character complement, and therefore do not have room to include many special characters. This is because OpenType can accommodate a very large number of glyphs. The only fonts you’ll find with true small caps built into their character complement are OpenType fonts. You want to set \spaceskip to a non null value (and perhaps also \xspaceskip).The difference between the true-drawn and the fake small caps is easy to see in these two examples: the fake, computer-generated ones are too light, and frequently too narrow as well as too tightly spaced, while the true small caps blend in beautifully.