Proposal to add small-capitals formatting directive

Question

I propose that a new formatting directive be added to access the font’s small capitals.

For example, <smcaps>some text</smcaps> would work, but I encourage discussion on any syntactic variant that appeals to you. The coolest thing is that since this is a simple matter of invoking the ᴄss font-variant: small-caps style spec, it is super-easy to implement. It would give better-looking pages for next to no effort.

If you wonder why this is needed, please see whatever the current word-of-the-day is at the Oxford English Dictionary at the time you read this. I will not link to the actual page, because it switches daily. But click through the ᴡᴏᴛᴅ link to see how real entries are supposed to look. You will see that the ᴏᴇᴅ uses small capitals for headwords, for authors in citations, and for the major volume in Roman numerals for multivolume works.

This is just one example; many, many reference works one would like to cite here use small capitals. It’s not just the ᴏᴇᴅ.

If you wonder why typographers consider small caps as integral a part of a font as italic, bold, or text figures, see Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style. I’m sure that ᴇʟ&ᴜ is using Georgia because it’s the most widely available font that supports text figures, as one of course wants to have. Like text figures, small capitals are an often-missed by critical component of good typography.

If you wonder why one cannot just use the Unicode small capitals, it’s because

• there are not very many of them;
• the Georgia font used here and in ᴇʟ&ᴜ proper does not even support them and so causes infelicitous fontsubbing;
• if you look at this posting from several different browsers and/or operating systems, you will get very different results
• some are only four or five yeras old in the spec, which means that even alterate serif fonts may not yet support the Unicode code points, as vendors are especially poor at this.

Let me show you how poorly Unicode small capitals are typically rendered by browsers. Consider this tr statement from the Perl language:

tr[aæbcdðeǝfgɠhiɨjklłmnoœɔȣprɹꝵstuʉɯvwyzʒγλπρψл]
  [ᴀᴁʙᴄᴅᴆᴇⱻꜰɢʛʜɪᵻᴊᴋʟᴌᴍɴᴏɶᴐᴕᴘʀᴚꝶꜱᴛᴜᵾꟺᴠᴡʏᴢᴣᴦᴧᴨᴩᴪᴫ];

If you think that is bad, just imagine writing “ᴀ ᴁ ʙ ᴄ ᴅ ᴆ ᴇ ⱻ ꜰ ɢ ʛ ʜ ɪ ᵻ ᴊ ᴋ ʟ ᴌ ᴍ ɴ ᴏ ɶ ᴐ ᴕ ᴘ ʀ ᴚ ꝶ ꜱ ᴛ ᴜ ᵾ ꟺ ᴠ ᴡ ʏ ᴢ ᴣ ᴦ ᴧ ᴨ ᴩ ᴪ ᴫ” in the normal serif roman. It looks horrible. The ᴄss font-variant fixes all that.

However, even without using a modern serif font like Arno Pro (standard with Adobe ᴄs3) or Alfios (a very nice free font by George Douros), and just sticking with simple things like Georgia (preferred for text figures) or Times New Roman, if you used the ᴄss markup then the browser would use the right small caps without needing to mess around with funny Unicode, or worry about searches getting messed up. The browser even emulates small caps for fonts lacking them.

It would make our pages look better, and it would make our citations more accurate. It seems only fair and right that ᴇʟ&ᴜ be able to accurately cite standard reference works. Here is one example where I do so, but I used Unicode small caps only for Roman numeral volumes in the citations. I used simple bold where the ᴏᴇᴅ has small caps for its headwords, and I used the regular roman instead of small caps for the authors’ names in the citations.

It would look much better, and be more correct, to use actual small capitals when accurately citing references. You would hope that ᴇʟ&ᴜ would be able to accurately cite standard reputable reference works without all these lamentable compromises. And because of ᴄss, it would be very easy to implement and not risk harming clarity, portability, or searchability at all the way all alteratives do.

I have no particular attachment to the <smcaps>some text</smcaps> syntax; it’s just one idea. I realize that by making it ʜᴛᴍʟ-ish it would work only in the main text, not in commentary, but I was unable to think of something that would work in the markdown within comments that did not risk break backwards compatibility. Perhaps others can come up with a better syntax.

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EDIT

Here’s a screen grab that shows how the ᴏᴇᴅ uses small caps in all three different ways:

It uses them for headwords, for authors’ names in citations, and for major volumes in roman numerals in citations. It’s the first that are especially useful, although the second is nice to have. The third doesn’t matter so much, although it’s nice to be able to make a complete citation.

They do all this through the ᴄss trick I mentioned earlier; it’s really easy to do.

Answer 1

EDIT: Replaced incorrect samples at bottom with true ones showing the difference between faked small caps and real ones, and made all images clickable for enlargement.

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In The Elements of Typographical Style, Robert Bringhurst writes:

Genuine small caps are not simply shrunken versions of the full caps. They differ from large caps in stroke weight, letterfit, and internal proportions as well as in height. Any good set of small caps is designed as such from the ground up. Thickening, shrinking, and squashing the full caps with digital modification routines will only produce a parody.

He then presents an example of the relationship of faces:

The small caps of 2.2 are obviously different from the uppercase in 2.1; they are also less aggressive on the eye than the almost garishly thick bold of 3.5, things one should reach for seldom. Bold works best as a titling face.

Here is another Bringhurst example where you can see how different true small caps are from the parody simulations of scaled-down full caps:

Modern OpenType fonts do allow one to access the true small caps included with that font, but Stack Exchange is not concerned with such niceties. If they were, they would also do something about the default line length, which is too many ens long for comfortable reading.

Since we are not granted access to the technology that would allow for small caps to be accessed in the correct way, we are forced to resort to what Bringhurst calls a parody.

Under the current limitations at Stack Exchange sites, the only available way to poorly simulate small capitals is to use

• These are <sub><sup>SMALL CAPITAL</sup></sub> letters.

to create

• These are _{^{SMALL CAPITAL}} letters.

However, the stroke weighting is far too light, and so bolding it can look better:

• These are _{^{SMALL CAPITAL}} letters.

That’s a bit too heavy in weight, but is better than the skeletal effect produced by simple resizing as in the first example.

From this answer is an example of OED etymology examples using small caps in the non-bold style:

pronounce

ME. pronunce, pronounce, a. OFr. pronuncier (1277 in Godef. Compl.), for earlier purnuncier (mod.Fr. prononcer) :– late L. prōnunciāre for orig. prōnuntiāre to proclaim, announce, rehearse, narrate, pronounce, f. prō, ^_PRO1 + nunti-āre to announce: cf. _{^{ANNOUNCE, ENOUNCE}}.

announce

a. OFr. anonce-r, earlier anoncier, anuncier :– L. adnuntiā-re, f. ad to + nuntiāre to bear a message, f. nunti-us bringing news. See _^AN- pref. ⁶.

enounce

ad. Fr. énoncer, ad. L. ēnuntiā-re (see _^ENUNCIATE), after the analogy of _^ANNOUNCE.

renounce

ad. Fr. renoncer (OFr. also renuncer) :– L. renuntiāre (-ciāre) to announce, proclaim, also to disclaim, protest against, f. re- re- + nuntiāre to make known, report: cf. _{^{ANNOUNCE, DENOUNCE}}, etc.

As you see, those are spindly and misshapen. Here is what you get when you bold them to thicken the stoke weight:

pronounce

ME. pronunce, pronounce, a. OFr. pronuncier (1277 in Godef. Compl.), for earlier purnuncier (mod.Fr. prononcer) :– late L. prōnunciāre for orig. prōnuntiāre to proclaim, announce, rehearse, narrate, pronounce, f. prō, ^_PRO1 + nunti-āre to announce: cf. _{^{ANNOUNCE, ENOUNCE}}.

announce

a. OFr. anonce-r, earlier anoncier, anuncier :– L. adnuntiā-re, f. ad to + nuntiāre to bear a message, f. nunti-us bringing news. See _^AN- pref. ⁶.

enounce

ad. Fr. énoncer, ad. L. ēnuntiā-re (see _^ENUNCIATE), after the analogy of _^ANNOUNCE.

renounce

ad. Fr. renoncer (OFr. also renuncer) :– L. renuntiāre (-ciāre) to announce, proclaim, also to disclaim, protest against, f. re- re- + nuntiāre to make known, report: cf. _{^{ANNOUNCE, DENOUNCE}}, etc.

The second simulation is better than the first, because the stroke is no longer far too thin to match the normal letters. However, it is now a bit too thick. Even worse, the proportions have become grotesque (in the non-technical sense) making clear why small caps must be designed from the start, not parodied with digital routines.

Fortunately, modern fonts have these. Here’s what it looks like when you use actual small caps using Richard Slimbach’s Minion Pro typeface, which gives the small caps a different letterfit — and also proportions, which you can see if you look at the real and fake P or A.

_{Click on the image to see it without resizing artifacts.}

See how much easier to read those small caps are than the two kinds of emulation available to us? Especially in the original image, the small caps are the same weight as everything else and so do not jump out at you as messed up the way the existing emulations do. They just plain work as typography, and there is no substitute for them.

Here in a nutshell is the difference, using Minion Pro in Chrome:

That’s really quite terrible: no wonder Bringhurst calls these emulations parodies!

Notice how the stroke width of the emulated small caps is no longer a match for the regular characters of the same font, and the letterfit it simply atrocious. The Firefox emulation is somewhat less lame about letterfit here than the embarrassing joke that Chrome presented:

_{(Those aren’t directly comparable because although the face is the same, the point size of the actual font I used in Firefox is slightly larger than the earlier one in Chrome.)}

As you see, the real small caps are more generous to the eye in several ways. There’s nothing to be done about stroke width and proportion, so even Firefox’s improved emulation is still a far cry from the real small caps in the font itself.

Unfortunately, Stack Exchange doesn’t care (enough?) to make the font’s actual small capitals available to us, even with the lame emulation, and so nasty parodies that Bringhurst speaks of are all we’re permitted to use.

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Technical Notes

The actual small caps in the first example are using CSS with font-feature-settings: "smcp" 1 and therefore use the true small caps in the font instead of trying to fake it. The emulated ones in the second examples are using CSS with font-variant: small-caps which despite its name perversely enough only emulates them!

Answer 2

If adding a small-caps option to EL&U is technologically feasible and straightforward, I would love to have the option to use them. As matters stand, when I quote definitions from old (and some new) dictionaries, I generally replace small-and-large-cap words with all-cap equivalents; but the closer my retyped versions are to the originals, the better I like it.

Answer 3

There is actually no absolute need for small caps in any type of writing that I know about. They are always an aesthetic choice, not a semantic one. In other words, there is nothing that can only be communicated via small caps, instead of via judicious use of all-caps plus some bold or italic.

If Markdown has small-cap capabilities and it just hasn't been enabled for StackOverflow, then I would have no objections to enabling it, but this isn't something that I think the developers should spend a lot of time on.

What is absolutely worse than useless is using Unicode small-caps, because more often than not, the result is unreadable. Especially for acronyms/initialisms, just use all caps, for heaven's sake. (I would argue that it is actually incorrect to use small caps for acronyms^*.)

^{* Small caps are a formatting choice like bold or italic: they do not affect whether a text is correctly spelled and punctuated. Capital letters, on the other hand, carry semantic weight: england is an incorrect spelling. Similarly, I believe that because ascii or oed would be incorrect spellings of these acronyms (or initialisms or abbreviations or whatever you want to call them), small-caps ᴀꜱᴄɪɪ and ᴏᴇᴅ are also incorrect spellings. Instead, you should write them as all-caps ASCII and OED, even if small caps are available as a formatting choice.}

Answer 4

I came here through your comment on my question, and couldn't leave without my 5 cents:

Modern HTML tries to more and more separate structure/semantics from styling, and Markdown as a lighter way to write a subset of HTML even more so. It is for this reason that in HTML one should use <em>x</em> and <strong>x</strong> (emphasis and strong emphasis) instead of <i>x</i> and <b>x</b> (italic and bold) – not to mention <font>! –, and the Markdown codes *x* and **x** stand for the former and not the latter. Because of that I think allowing more styling-oriented markup in questions and answers on SE would be the wrong move.

From that separation perspective, the question would be: What kind of semantics would you like to lead to a styling in small caps? For example, on the Oxford English Dictionary website, small caps are used to style names. Since HTML does not have a <name> tag, the correct way to implement this would be to use a <span> with a class attribute

1929 <span class="name">F. M. McNeill</span> <em>Scots Kitchen</em>

and then have an associated style sheet that contains

span.name { font-variant: small-caps; }

And it would be even better to also use something like <span class="title"> instead of <em> in the above example. However, to enable something like that on SE would necessitate to agree on a whole host of additional semantic classes.

Of course, SE could go beyond the small subset of HTML whitelisted in questions and answers and allow to use something like <span style="font-variant: small-caps">, but a) that would go against semantics & style separation, and b) I guess it would it make harder for them to filter out other kinds of HTML markup that might have malicious side effects. Also, we are not the designers of this website, just the guys who write all the text. ;-)