Small caps

Small caps are uppercase, the amount of normal height ( x-height ) of the lowercase letters. They are used for emphasis in typography instead of lowercase. In addition, there are false capitals whose height is between x and cap height, and Versalschrift capital letters of uniform height.

Line thickness and gray value of the caps are based on those of the Commons. In German-speaking and the English term synonymous Small Caps will be used.

In the early days of printing, not cursive writings viewed as belonging to the same family as the normal sections. Where italics are used primarily as a display font in modern typesetting, were initially in addition to the blocking only small caps available.

Today they are used primarily for names and occasionally for the first few words of a paragraph after a heading.

If there are no real small caps ( see the left shoulder of the figure) are present in a text typeface, word processing programs can produce incorrect caps by scaling uppercase. This practice is frowned upon but in typography, as these characters either too big to fail too bright ( as in the figure on the right ) or. In addition, capital letters and false small caps have different, non-harmonic weights. They are not as balanced as true small caps. In both cases, they then fall when viewed from a distance immediately apparent.

Therefore, in the font family of an expert set, there are almost always special type styles for small caps: normal, italic, bold and small caps. With OpenType fonts, true small caps are often integrated as a separate glyphs in the font style. You can then call in word processing programs via appropriate OpenType features.

For the German ligature that ß is represented by an SS or, more recently, by the Eszett ( ẞ ) in Kapitälchenform. The View as SZ in cases where no confusion is possible, as in ground ( GND) and dimensions ( MASZE ), is no longer officially since the spelling reform of 1996.

Caps should be easily disabled ( 0.5-1 point), if not already provided for the font itself. Balancing is not necessary in the factory set.

In the Anglo-Saxon typography, the caps are about 10 % larger than the Commons. The technique OpenType font contains two features for accessing the small caps: Small Caps for the 10 % larger small caps and small caps in the normal commons - size Petite Caps.

The term small-cap spread in the German-speaking countries since about 1990 by English language software such as QuarkXPress, PageMaker and other desktop publishing programs.