UnicodeĪlthough small caps are not usually "semantically important", the Unicode standard does define a number of "small capital" characters in the IPA extensions, Phonetic Extensions and Latin Extended-D ranges (0250–02AF, 1D00–1D7F, A720–A7FF). Since the CSS styles the text, readers are still able to copy the normally-capitalized plain text from the web page. AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz. For example, the HTML Jane Doe AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz Small caps can be specified in CSS using "font-variant: small-caps ". The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles in United States legal citations. Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag the parts of speech in a sentence e.g., In zoological and botanical nomenclature it is common use to print names of the family group in small caps. Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "L ORD" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original in some versions the compound "Lord G OD" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh. In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible the word "L ORD" is set in small-caps. Similarly, they are used for those languages in which the surname comes first, such as the romanization Mao Zedong. An elementary example is Don Quixote de La Mancha. In printed plays and stage directions small caps are usually used for the names of characters preceding their lines.įrench and some British publications use small caps to indicate the surname by which someone with a long formal name is to be designated in the rest of a written work. The initialisms ad, bc, am, and pm are often smallcapped as well. For example, the style of many American publications, including the Atlantic Monthly and USA Today, is to use small caps for acronyms and initialisms longer than three letters thus: " U.S." in normal caps, but " nato" in small caps. Small caps are often used for sections of text that is all uppercase this makes the run of capital letters seem less jarring to the reader. A work-around to simulate real small capitals is to use a one-level bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems, to match well with the normal weights of capitals and lower case, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letterspaced a half point or a point.
How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system some can use true small caps associated with modern professional fonts, making text such as "Latvia joined Nato on March 29, 2004" look proportional, but less complex digital fonts do not have a small-caps case, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction, making them look out of proportion. Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps this leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase letters to small caps. Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters, and a wider aspect ratio to facilitate readability. Since the support for the petite caps feature is lacking in most Desktop publishing programs, a lot of fonts use x-height small caps in the small caps feature. OpenType fonts can define both forms via the small caps and the petite caps feature. To differentiate between these two variants the x-height form is sometimes called petite caps. Typically, the height of a small capital will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font In Anglo-Saxon typography small caps are about 10% larger than the x-height. They 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. For example, TEXT IN CAPS appears as text in caps. They are used in running text to prevent capitalized words from appearing too large on the page, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate. In typography, small capitals (usually abbreviated small caps) are uppercase ( capital) characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase ( small) letters or text figures. True small caps (top) compared with scaled small caps (bottom) generated by Writer.