Small caps text

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[loukash]

12 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

you pointed a feature in the Glyphs panel that I did not know exists

Way too many features are buried in barely visible micro menus or context menus.
What ever happened to the Humane Interface Guidelines…? Jeff Raskin is rotating in his grave.

 

 

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[kenmcd]

In testing many different fonts today I found no faked small caps anywhere in the APub Glyphs Browser.
So that is a relief.
But, still being able to create fake small caps from the Typography Panel or the button is not good.
Please give us a way to turn this Off.

The only way for applications to reliably display small caps in a panel for selection (like ID) is to process the OpenType feature code.
Glyph names for small caps are not standard and very greatly.
The suffixes vary - .sc, .smcp, .sml, .small, etc. ... Source Sans Pro uses just .s
Sometimes an additional language suffix is added, from Minion 3: uni0306.sccyr  or an alternate uni2C6D.scalt 
And then you have fonts like Times New Roman which has no glyph names at all. They use the Glyph ID in their feature code.
I could go on and on, but you get the point - no standard glyph names for small caps.
App must process the feature code to get the glyphs to list/display them.

There are no standard Unicode code points for small cap glyphs.
Most fonts these days do not use the PUA like Minion Pro, created in 2007, which has 699 glyphs up there.
Minion 3 (2018) has only six glyphs in the PUA. 6.
App must process the feature code to get the glyphs to list/display them.

@Lagarto
I wanted to respond to your Source Sans Pro capital G example above.
Not a good example to use a sans serif font with minimal contrast, and use a rounded glyph, and alone.
The main optical improvements in real small caps are in the vertical stem weight, the width, and the side bearings.
The scaled rounded G glyph alone from a low contrast sans serif font would not show any of this.

Another big issue is the kerning, or the bad kerning in faked small caps, because this problem can be very obvious.
In Minion Pro for example, the TH capitals have no kerning at all.
So in the 70% faked small caps the Th would also have no kerning at all.
But in the Minion Pro real Th with small caps applied, the small caps H is is actually kerned under the capital T (as it should be).
The first thing I noticed in the bad movie credits with the faked small caps that I mentioned above
is that the initial capitals looked like they were floating off in left field.
Looked like no kerning at all.
My first thought was how does a person get hired for a high-profile gig like this ... and not know typography basics?

@pcdlibrary
Sorry we hijacked your thread.
If I can can take a look inside any fonts for you, please just ask.
Oh yeah, to answer your question, no easy way to determine if a font has real small caps. 🙂

 

[Old Bruce]

5 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

Oh yeah, to answer your question, no easy way to determine if a font has real small caps. 🙂

 

I go by this rule of thumb, Most Don't.I check the glyph count if it is over a grand it may have them but you do have to check the glyphs, I use the OS utility (on Mac ) Font Book.

[kenmcd]

12 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I go by this rule of thumb, Most Don't

By the percentages, a safe bet.👍

Everybody .... Please help persuade Affinity to enable us to turn-off all fakes.
No fake italics, no fake bold, no fake small caps, etc. And no silent character replacements!
Only enable actually supported OpenType features.
If we can disable all fakes, then a well crafted test document can show what the font can and cannot do.
Been building it in my head for weeks, but finding out about these fake small caps has brought that to a screeching halt.

 

[walt.farrell]

36 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

Everybody .... Please help persuade Affinity to enable us to turn-off all fakes.
No fake italics, no fake bold, no fake small caps, etc. And no silent character replacements!

Given that

• Affinity does not provide fake italic or fake bold at all, and that
• the super- and subscript Typography options only work with true characters,

it seems odd that the Typography options for small caps would provide faked versions. I think that inconsistency should be remedied, and fakes reserved for the Positioning and Transform options.

[kenmcd]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Given that

• Affinity does not provide fake italic or fake bold at all, and that
• the super- and subscript Typography options only work with true characters,

it seems odd that the Typography options for small caps would provide faked versions. I think that inconsistency should be remedied, and fakes reserved for the Positioning and Transform options.

Yes! So if the fake small caps go away, and the silent character replacement bug is fixed ... my test doc should work. Yeaaaa.
Ugh. When these are fixed it means I actually have to work on this.
And you get to test it Walt!

 

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[pcdlibrary]

To emphasize words in stories without darkening the text by applying Bold, I created small caps text styles with a dedicated small caps font. I like Spectral SC (available to download free) for this. Am I on the right track, or do you envisage some demons lurking in shady places?

[loukash]

True small caps:

 

Fake small caps:

[loukash]

8 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Basically the only way the user can deduce that fake small caps formatting is applied is (in addition to examinining closely the glyphs themselves) by browsing through the entire Glyphs panel to check whether small capital versions are listed.

If you set the Glyph Browser to "Unicode plus Alternates" > All, you will have "true" small caps side by side with regular caps, as in my first screenshot above.

That all said, I agree with you on Serif's inconsistency and confusing implementation.
Fake small caps should remain though, but as opt-in!

[pcdlibrary]

On 1/28/2021 at 3:32 AM, Lagarto said:

As for discussion on "true" vs. "fake" nature of small capitals, it is probably good to note that even glyphs in fonts like Source Sans Pro, which have "c2sc" feature label attached to them (when viewing e.g. with InDesign Glyphs panel, as shown above), are actually beforehand created glyphs and not something that are "synthesized" and created "on demand" (as the examples of CorelDRAW options above show). Dynamic modifications are probably available in variable fonts, but they, too, are more complex transformations than simple scalings and stretches. 

To illustrate this, here is an image where the regular "G" from Source Sans Pro (black outline) is simply just fitted to the bounding box of a small capital "G" of the same font (the red dotted outline):

The question is: is this a "fake" small cap, just because it has probably been created by using advanced features of modern font editor app (allowing increasing line thicknesses and making other kinds of non-linear changes), under a control of professional designer, and because the small caps in this font do not have separate code points and accordingly do not exist in the Glyphs panel of Affinity apps (even amongst the glyphs in the Private Use Area table as do the small capitals that have a Unicode code point)?

Based on this I do not think that the quality of small capitals can be judged simply by the way the glyphs are tagged (e.g. marked as using the "c2sc" OpenType feature as in the case of Source Sans Pro) or how they can be accessed. Modern graphic apps make it also very easy to adjust typography, e.g use kerning and tracking to make finishing touches, so if something does not look perfect out of the box, it can probably be made so by using minor adjustments. 

Based on all that is transpiring (transpired, word coined by James Michener) here, someone who is technically qualified, might write a book on small caps. Title suggestions: Small Caps-true or false; Small Caps-genuine or fake; A short history of small caps; True small caps-Who cares? Small caps for the connoisseur. Any witty titles out there?

[pcdlibrary]

When my font is Minion Pro, and I choose small caps, they are True SCs, correct?

[pcdlibrary]

I'm still confused about using Quote, so here again: 

Based on all that is transpiring (transpired, word coined by James Michener) here, someone who is technically qualified, might write a book on small caps. Title suggestions: Small Caps-true or false; Small Caps-genuine or fake; A short history of small caps; True small caps-Who cares? Small caps for the connoisseur. Any witty titles out there?

[Old Bruce]

12 minutes ago, pcdlibrary said:

When my font is Minion Pro, and I choose small caps, they are True SCs, correct?

Check for the  glyphs with your OS font utility. On Mac it is Font Book and I am unsure what Windows uses.

[kenmcd]

7 hours ago, pcdlibrary said:

When my font is Minion Pro, and I choose small caps, they are True SCs, correct?

Yes.

I forgot, there are a couple online font tools which do show if a font has "real" OpenType small caps.
They have varying degrees of coverage for different OpenType features, but small caps analysis is pretty good in both.

FontDrop.info - https://fontdrop.info/
Correctly shows the small caps feature is available, and shows many (most) of the characters.
This one even dumps the contents of the various tables from inside the font.
It is reading the OpenType feature code for sure.
Does not analyze it 100% comprehensively; it is not a shaper.

WakamaiFondue.com - https://wakamaifondue.com/
Also lists the features available correctly in my tests.

Both will confirm that a font does have a real OpenType small caps feature.
And if the font does not, small caps do not appear in the list of features.

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[loukash]

13 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

an old git like me and happen to still have Type 1 versions installed

Coincidentally earlier today:

 

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[loukash]

4 hours ago, Lagarto said:

there needs to be some level of support, as legacy fonts are needed to be able to open correctly old projects.

Well, there’s still virtualization and emulation. For example, I'm maintaining a Mac OS 9 disk image inside Sheep Shaver that runs Adobe Type Manager and has access to my font folders "outside" in the unix world, including all resource fork fonts of all types. It can run almost any app compatible with Mac OS 9. (Not to speak of my "antique" Macs going as far back as 1992 LC475.)

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[pcdlibrary]

19 hours ago, LibreTraining said:

Yes.

I forgot, there are a couple online font tools which do show if a font has "real" OpenType small caps.
They have varying degrees of coverage for different OpenType features, but small caps analysis is pretty good in both.

FontDrop.info - https://fontdrop.info/
Correctly shows the small caps feature is available, and shows many (most) of the characters.
This one even dumps the contents of the various tables from inside the font.
It is reading the OpenType feature code for sure.
Does not analyze it 100% comprehensively; it is not a shaper.

WakamaiFondue.com - https://wakamaifondue.com/
Also lists the features available correctly in my tests.

Both will confirm that a font does have a real OpenType small caps feature.
And if the font does not, small caps do not appear in the list of features.

Thank you. I have FontBase; but will try the ones you suggest. This advanced discussion is over my head. MinionPro has small caps; but when I click on Font, I do not see SC in the drop down list.

[kenmcd]

5 hours ago, pcdlibrary said:

MinionPro has small caps; but when I click on Font, I do not see SC in the drop down list.

Older fonts and old conversions may have a separate SC small caps font. This is because in older fonts (before Unicode) the fonts could only have 256 characters per font. So small caps had their own font. Other languages had their own font. Extra symbols, or swashes, etc. So most of the "SC" fonts you see are old conversions.

But separate SC fonts are making a comeback due to Google Fonts not including features like small caps in their online web fonts. So to make small caps available some fonts have again made a separate SC font available for web font use (e.g. Vollkorn).

What we have been talking about here is when small caps are included in the same font file and accessed using the OpenType feature. That is why you do not see a separate Minion Pro SC font listed. The small caps in Minion Pro are in the same font file.