Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Small Caps

Almost any program can turn selected lowercase letters into SMALL CAPS, where a capital is still a capital and the other letters become capital letters about the height of lowercase letters. The problem, though, is that the computer simply reduces the size of the existing capital letters. This creates a proportion distortion between the cap and the small cap, where the capital letter appears much heavier than the corresponding smaller capitals, as shown on page 90. In many OpenType and expert set fonts, the small caps are not just small capitals, but are letterforms that have been totally redesigned to visually match the large cap in the same point size. See Chapter 9.