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What are Small Caps?

Small caps are uppercase letterforms rendered at approximately the height of the lowercase letters (x-height), rather than at full capital height. They provide the visual weight and distinction of capitals without the typographic dissonance of large uppercase letters interrupting the flow of lowercase text. Small caps are a typographic refinement used for abbreviations, acronyms, headings within body text, and certain stylistic purposes.

The key distinction is between true small caps and synthesized small caps. True small caps are specifically designed glyphs in the font, drawn at small-cap size with proportions, stroke weights, and spacing optimized for that size. Synthesized small caps are created by simply scaling down regular capital letters — the result has thinner strokes and tighter spacing than the surrounding text, creating a visually inconsistent (and typographically inferior) result.

True vs. Synthesized Small Caps

OpenType Small Caps Features

OpenType fonts can include multiple small-cap variants:

• smcp — Converts lowercase letters to small caps
• c2sc — Converts uppercase letters to small caps
• pcap — Petite caps (even smaller, at cap-height of lowercase)

/* CSS for true OpenType small caps */
p.lede {
  font-variant-caps: small-caps;
  /* or specifically enable smcp feature: */
  font-feature-settings: "smcp" 1;
}

/* All caps to small caps (c2sc + smcp together) */
abbr {
  font-variant-caps: all-small-caps;
  font-feature-settings: "smcp" 1, "c2sc" 1;
}

Typographic Uses of Small Caps

1. Abbreviations and acronyms: NASA, CEO, HTML — setting these in small caps prevents them from shouting out of the text
2. Roman numerals: Chapter xi, Volume iv
3. Running heads: section titles in smaller text within body copy
4. Initial caps: a drop cap followed by small caps for the rest of the first line
5. Names in bibliographies: Author names often set in small caps
6. Time designations: 9:30 am, 100 bc, ad 476

Small Caps and Unicode

Unicode does not encode a "small caps" as a text property — it is purely a typographic/OpenType concept. However, the Unicode Letterlike Symbols and Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols blocks do contain characters that look like small caps, used in mathematical notation and informal internet stylization:

These are IPA phonetic characters, not true small caps for general text use.

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