Small caps


In typography, small caps are letters or other symbols that have the graphic form of uppercase letters but which are typeset at a smaller size, approaching or matching the height of lowercase letters or text figures in the text. Small caps are used in running text as a form of emphasis that is less dominant than all uppercase text, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate. For example, the text "Text in small caps" appears as in 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.
Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters and have a wider aspect ratio for readability.
Typically, the height of a small capital glyph will be one ex, the same height as most lowercase characters in the font. In fonts with relatively low x-height, however, small caps may be somewhat larger than this. For example, in some Tiro Typeworks fonts, small caps glyphs are 30% larger than x-height, and 70% the height of full capitals. To differentiate between these two alternatives, the x-height form is sometimes called petite caps, preserving the name "small caps" for the larger variant.
OpenType fonts can define both forms via the "small caps" and the "petite caps" features. When the support for the petite caps feature is absent from a desktop publishing program, x-height small caps are often substituted.
Many word processors and text formatting systems include an option to format text in caps and small caps, which leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase letters to small caps. 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. However, this will make the characters look somewhat out of proportion. A work-around to simulate real small capitals is to use a bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems, to match well with the normal weights of capitals and lowercase, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letter-spaced a half point or a point.

Uses

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—thus "U.S." and "W.H.O." in normal caps but "" in small caps.
The initialisms Anno Domini|, Common Era|, ante meridiem|, and post meridiem| are sometimes typeset in small caps.
In printed plays small caps are used for stage directions and the names of characters before their lines.
Some publications use small caps to indicate surnames. An elementary example is Don de La Mancha. In the 21st century, the practice is gaining traction in scientific publications.
In many versions of the Old Testament of the Bible, the word "" is set in small caps. Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "" corresponds to the use of Yahweh in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord " represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.
In zoological and botanical nomenclature, the small caps are occasionally used for genera and families.
In computational complexity theory, a sub-field of computer science, the formal names of algorithmic problems, e.g. MᴀxSAT, are sometimes set in small caps.
Linguists use small caps to analyze the morphology and tag the parts of speech in a sentence; e.g.,
Linguists also use small caps to refer to the keywords in lexical sets for particular languages or dialects; e.g. the and vowels in English.
The Bluebook prescribes small caps for some titles and names in United States legal citations. The practice precedes World War I, with Harvard Law Review using it while referring to itself. By 1915, small caps were used for all titles of journals and books.
In many books, mention of another part of the same book or mentions the work as a whole will be set in small caps. For example, articles in The World Book Encyclopedia refer to the encyclopedia as a whole and to the encyclopedia's other articles in small caps, as in the "Insurance" article's direction, at one point, to "See ", "No-Fault Insurance" being another of the encyclopedia's articles.
Among Romance languages, as an orthographic tradition, only the French and Spanish languages render Roman numerals in small caps to denote centuries, e.g. and siglo for "18th century"; the numerals are cardinally postpositive in Spanish alone.

History

Computer support

Fonts

The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to small caps by two feature tags, smcp and c2sc. A font may use the tag smcp to indicate how to transform lower-case letters to small caps, and the tag c2sc to indicate how to transform upper-case letters to small caps. OpenType provides support for transformations from normal letters to petite caps by two feature tags, pcap and c2pc. A font may use the tag pcap to indicate how to transform lower-case letters to petite caps, and the tag c2pc to indicate how to transform upper-case letters to petite caps.
Desktop publishing applications, as well as web browsers, can use these features to display petite caps. However, only a few currently do so. LibreOffice can use the method.

Word processors

Professional desktop publishing applications supporting genuine small caps include Quark XPress, and Adobe Creative Suite applications.
Most word processing applications, including Microsoft Word and Pages, do not automatically substitute true small caps when working with OpenType fonts that include them, instead generating scaled ones. 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. LibreOffice Writer started allowing true small caps for OpenType fonts since version 5.3, they can be enabled via a syntax used in the Font Name input box, including font name, a colon, feature tag, an equals sign and feature value, for example, EB Garamond 12:smcp=1, and version 6.2 added a dialog to switch.

Unicode

In orthography, small caps are allographs of capital letters. Unicode defines a number of small-capital characters for specialized use such as phonetic notation. They are deprecated as substitutes for small-cap formatting; rather, the basic character set should be used with suitable formatting controls as described in the preceding sections.
The Unicode petite-capital characters are found in the IPA extensions, Phonetic Extensions, Latin Extended-D and other blocks. These characters are intended for use in notation where they are semantically distinct – that is, for cases where they are not allographs. For example, petite capital represents a uvular trill in IPA, and a voiced uvular plosive; capital and have no defined meaning in IPA, but are commonly used as wildcards for 'resonant' and 'glide'. Thus using formatting to replicate would not be appropriate in phonetic notation, because if the formatting were lost, data would be lost and the text would change in meaning.
The petite-capital characters defined by Unicode for letters of the basic Latin alphabet are as follows.
Shaded cells mark petite capitals that are not very distinct from minuscules in roman typeface, but they may be distinct in italic typeface, as is used in some phonetic notation.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
baselineᴀʙᴄᴅᴇꜰɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘꞯʀꜱᴛᴜᴠᴡʏᴢ
superscript???ᶦᶫᶰ?ᶸ?
overscript**◌ᷛ◌ᷞ◌ᷟ◌ᷡ◌ᷢ

* Superscript versions of petite-capital ᴀ, ᴅ, ᴇ and ᴘ are scheduled to be released with version 18 of the Unicode Standard in 2026.
** Although the overscript characters are identified as 'small capitals' in Unicode, there are no corresponding capital overscript characters that they contrast with.
§ Cyrillic ? ? ? and ◌ⷡ ◌ⷩ ◌ⷦ ◌ⷮ might be substituted for these letters.
Additionally, a few less-common Latin characters and several Greek characters also have petite capitals encoded:
ÆÐƎƓᵷ ĦƗꞰŁꞭŋ ŒƆȢɹ ꝵɄƜƷ
baselineᴁᴃᴆⱻʛ?ᵻ?ᴌ?ᴎɶᴐᴕᴙᴚʁꭆꝶᵾꟺᴣ
superscript??ꟸᶧ??ʶ

ΓΔΘΛΞΠΡΣΦΨΩ
baselineᴦᴧᴨᴩᴪꭥ

There is little call for small caps in Cyrillic, as there would be little graphic difference between small caps and lowercase. However, Unicode does provide for one small cap Cyrillic letter for use in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, where small caps and lowercase are distinct in italic typeface:
Л
baselineᴫ