How can we use small caps in our posts?

Question

How can we get small capitals to appear in our answer posts? There is no guidance that I can find anywhere.

Here's some that I've copied and pasted, but I can't actually get small caps to appear in the dialogue box myself.

2 : to put on the appearance of : sɪᴍᴜʟᴀᴛᴇ

Answer 1

It's possible to get a _{^{REASONABLE APPROXIMATION}} of small caps by enclosing a string of capitals in both <sub> and <sup> (in that order). As you see, the baselines don't line up exactly, although the size is quite a good match for the x-height of normal text. True small caps should be slightly wider than a simple optical reduction, though.

<sub><sup>REASONABLE APPROXIMATION</sup></sub>

This method is easy and will display something intelligible in browsers that can't handle the full Unicode set. If that doesn't appeal, then there's either tchrist's method, or using the Windows Character Map application to find, copy and paste real small caps. That app does not make it easy to find small capitals in fonts, though, and there's no guarantee that other systems will be able to display them (it depends on browser capabilities and the fonts installed).

Answer 2

I’m delighted you asked...

...but as I am unclear on the clusivity of we, I shall answer not in the semantically ambiguous first person plural but in the far more concrete first person singular, explaining what I myself do. I merely run whatever lowercased text string through the following one-to-one transliteration set via a simple little ᴄʟɪ tool written in Perl, wherein I map each code point from the first set to the one that figures immediately below it:

tr[aæbcdðeǝfgɠhiɨjklłmnoœɔȣprɹꝵstuʉɯvwyzʒγλπρψл]
  [ᴀᴁʙᴄᴅᴆᴇⱻꜰɢʛʜɪᵻᴊᴋʟᴌᴍɴᴏɶᴐᴕᴘʀᴚꝶꜱᴛᴜᵾꟺᴠᴡʏᴢᴣᴦᴧᴨᴩᴪᴫ];

This does not always produce the most appealing of results in our selected type face, but in the fullness of time this too shall pass.

This is currently less that idea, given its current incompleteness: there’s nothing for x or q, and s and f are so newly defined that support for them in your computer’s implementation of our selected Georgia face may be poor, triggering an ugly font-substitution algorithm to kick in.

Because these are actual code points not out-of-band formatting mark-up, this has the advantage of surviving reuse of the content which loses formatting. However, it has the disadvantage of being at the mercy of whoever cut the type, er, created the electronic font.

If the CSS style sheet for our site could be modified so that when someone used **bold** here it produced a span with this CSS style hint:

font-feature-settings: "smcp" 1

Then we could in the most trivial of ways employ the actual small capitals in our own font, allowing us to produce text like this via simple markdown^{(content credit to the ᴏᴇᴅ, typesetting my own)}:

                  _{click here to see properly rendered without compression artifacts}

Isn’t that elegant? It’s how real dictionaries do things, you know, and quite useful in scholarly text. Alas, my ancient entreaties that this be done fall ever on ears deaf to the request and eyes blind to the aesthetics of type well set.

If I had my druthers, all inline **bold markup** on ᴇʟᴜ would magically work this way, with the font’s actual bold reserved for headers where it belongs, not used as inline weighting where specifying bold would map to native small capitals.

Plus it would give Professor Lawler’s weighting score another ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴏʟ-ᴍᴇᴛᴀ-ᴄᴏᴋᴇ-ʙᴏᴛᴛʟᴇ bucky bit to dress up one’s postings with. :)