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.
For example, in some Tiro Typeworks fonts, small caps glyphs are 30% larger than x-height, and 70% the height of full capitals.
How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system; some can use true small caps glyphs that are included in modern professional typefaces; but less complex computer 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).
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[3][4]—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O."
[13] Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag (gloss) the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g., She3SG.F.NOMlove-slove-3SG.PRS.INDyou.2She love-s you.3SG.F.NOM love-3SG.PRS.IND 2Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the fleece and trap vowels in English.
The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations.
Among Romance languages, as an orthographic tradition, only the French and Spanish languages render Roman numerals in small caps to denote centuries, e.g. xviiie siècle and siglo xviii for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone.
[16][17] 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.
[1] The idea caught on in France, where small capitals were used by Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne and Claude Garamond.
[21] 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.
An isolated early appearance was in the Enschedé type foundry specimen of 1768, which featured a set cut by Joan Michaël Fleischman,[27][28] 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.
[25][31][32] The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to small caps by two feature tags, smcp and c2sc.
OpenType provides support for transformations from normal letters to petite caps by two feature tags, pcap and c2pc.
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.
Unicode defines a number of small-capital (or, more accurately, petite-capital) characters for specialized use such as phonetic notation.
