FUNCTION

Small Capitals, or commonly just Small Caps, are letters with a capital letter structure but smaller in size (hence the name).

USAGE

They are used in texts when there are many capital letters together (initials, abbreviations, acronyms, Roman figures or all caps words in texts). In traditional typesetting where a new chapter starts with an initial or drop cap, the other letters of the first word or the entire first line can also be set in small caps to ease out the change towards the following text in lowercase.

HISTORY

The use of small caps started to be popular during metal type printing, as they added an additional option to the typographic palette, while keeping the same typeface.

Today, small caps are not present in every digital Latin typeface (they have their own Unicode values and are not in every Latin character set), as using small caps was more common in the ‘Latin’ world and used in traditional typography.

Some text processing or design applications can automatically generate small caps by scaling down capitals letters (just like they can do the same for italic or bold styles), but this is not advised for high quality typography, as the weight relation is much lighter.

DESIGN

Small caps have no precise height proportions compared to the capitals or lowercase, but a good ratio sits between these two heights.

Their weight and contrast should match those of the lowercase, and their height/width proportions are usually slightly wider than simply scaled-down capitals.