in Design
True small caps and fake ones
Small caps are one of the quiet signs of careful typesetting. Scaled-down capitals are one of the loud signs of the opposite.
Small capitals are capital letterforms drawn at roughly the height of the lowercase letters. They are used where full capitals would be too loud: for the opening words of a chapter, for abbreviations in some styles, for running heads, and for emphasis that should not shout. Used well, they blend into the text. Used badly, they show immediately that something has gone wrong.
What true small caps are
A true small cap is a separately designed letter. The type designer draws it to sit comfortably with the lowercase, which usually means making it a little wider than a shrunken capital and giving it stroke weights that match the lowercase letters around it. Small caps are typically drawn at or slightly above the x-height.
In a well-made digital font, small caps are part of the font itself and are accessed through an OpenType feature. Designers and typesetters switch them on in layout software, usually with a setting labelled small caps or all small caps, depending on whether lowercase letters, capitals or both are to be converted.
What fake ones are
When a font has no small caps, or when the software is told to create them rather than use the font’s own, the program simply takes the full capitals and scales them down. The result is a letter of the right height but the wrong weight. Because every stroke is reduced in proportion, the letters come out noticeably thinner and lighter than the surrounding text. They often look cramped as well, because the letter spacing shrinks with them.
On a page of text, faked small caps look faint and spindly beside the lowercase. The difference is easiest to see in a running head or in the opening words of a chapter, where small caps are set next to regular text. Once someone has seen it, they tend to see it everywhere.
How to tell the difference
Compare the stroke thickness of a small cap letter with a lowercase letter next to it. With true small caps, the vertical strokes of an H and an n look similar in weight. With faked ones, the small cap H is visibly lighter.
The other check is at the source. In layout software, see whether the font offers small caps as an OpenType feature. If the font lacks them and the software is quietly generating them, it is usually possible to tell from the font’s glyph set, or from a warning or highlighting option in the program.
If a chosen text face does not include small caps, there are options: choose a related family that does, use capitals with additional spacing for short runs, or avoid small caps in the design. Faking them should not be one of the options.
Setting them well
Small caps usually benefit from a little extra letter spacing. Robert Bringhurst recommends spacing strings of capitals and small caps, and a small increase, often in the region of five to ten per cent, is typical in book work. The right amount depends on the face.
Consistency matters. Decide which words take small caps and apply the rule throughout: the first line or first few words of a chapter, the first words after a scene break, certain abbreviations, perhaps the running heads. Different house styles have different conventions for abbreviations, such as whether era designations or acronyms are set in small caps, so the choice should be agreed with the editor.
Many fonts also include small cap figures and punctuation, which keep numbers and marks at the right height within a small cap phrase. They are worth using where the font provides them.
Small caps are a detail, and like most typographic details they are only noticed when they are wrong.