"Small caps" vs. "All small caps"

[mc7121]

Still, if you need to have the upper case as capitals and the lower case as small caps, all you need to do is apply "All small caps" OpenType feature and the Small Caps feature. The result is just what you want...

Well I fear that's just not what you want. As you can see in the screen shot below, with your solution, the big caps in Mellel are bolder than the small caps. That's just not what you want with small caps. As the screen shot shows, TextEdit, however, does it right.

[Mart°n]

Mellel does this the way this is supposed to be done in OpenType: All Small Caps means All Small caps. The fact that some fonts (e.g. Cardo, Garogier) do something differently here does not mean that they do the right thing, of course.

I agree here and think Cardo does the wrong thing, even if it will lead to the right result.

The reason why TextEdit works differently here is simply because it contains an "override" for the small-caps instructions with a capital letter, that's all.

And that’s what I would like to see in Mellel too.

Still, if you need to have the upper case as capitals and the lower case as small caps, all you need to do is apply "All small caps" OpenType feature and the Small Caps feature. The result is just what you want... Still, two things to bear in mind:
A. This "double capping" makes the font appear smaller. You'll have to compensate for that.
B. Mellel uses the small caps style characters with the capitals. Typographically, that's perhaps better, but YMMV.

Maybe we’re talking about two different horses here.
Using OpenType › All Small Caps and Character Case › Small Caps will of cause lead to so some sort of mixed caps but the result is not satisfying at all. Let’s look at a picture:



I’ve used Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro in this example as it offers real OpenType small caps. The settings I’ve applied to the font are mentioned on the right side in red.
Using OpenType Small Caps and the Case › Small Caps setting leads to a shrinked font as you’ve mentioned in (A). If you compensate this by increasing the font size (which is a terrible workaround, by the way) the big capital letters look too bold compared to the small caps. The stroke width with whom both are painted is not the same. The result looks like a bold version of faked small caps. If you apply the same settings to a whole sentence, it looks even worse:



Not only the big capital letters look like bold versions but also some puntuation (the apostrophe in the example) looks really bad.

So I couldn’t agree with you:

Typographically, that's perhaps better, but YMMV.

In my opinion, it looks even worse than faked small caps, but both look terrible at all. For me it’s not a solution but something to put into the trash.

The last example (on both pictures) shows how the result should look like (the OpenType › Small Caps option is only applied to the otherwise lowercase letters).

[Mart°n]

Ori,
I would like to hear your opinion about the fact that Fake Small Caps letters have a lower height in their middle length than real letter

I’m not Ori but I’ll try to answer anyway. First, your “fact” isn’t a fact at all. The height of the lower case letters is called x-height (the height of the small x). If you compare some fonts to each other, you’ll notice, that the ratio between the capital and the small letters varies from font to font. Let’s look at a picture (all black fonts have the same size of 12 points at 300%):



As you could see, the x-height of Garamond is much smaller than the x-height of Verdana. If you compare the small x to the fake small caps x (in the third column), you could see, that the small caps version is larger than the lowercase x for Garamond and Times and that the small caps x is smaller than the lowercase x for Myriad and Verdana.

"m" has height x, the face small cap "M" should have the same height x, but in fact has x-something. This should not be and looks even worse. I asked at another place about this but did not see an answer yet.

Not true, too. One more picture:



You could see some real small caps fonts and their x compared to the lowercase x. As you could see, the small caps x is bigger than the lowercase one most of the time (and not equal). This is due the fact, that the small caps letters should have the same optical size compared to the lowercase letters. As there are large lowercase letters (t, l, i, j, k) the small caps letters are a little bit higher or have an average height of the different lowercase letters (xlmkojib). So one couldn’t say, that small caps letters should be as high as lowercase letters, even if it’s barely true for the last font (Briem Script) in the example above.

I would very much like to know whether this is intended and to receive a comment about whether you plan to change this (x or even x+something would look OK)

The conclusion of the above is that there is not THE value (x+ or x- something) that would make faked small caps look good as this value has to be changed for every font. You also couldn’t find the perfect value as a multiplier of the lowercase letters, as the perfect size of small caps is a matter of optical size (how it will look) an not a mathematical size (1.1 x lowercase, no matter how the result will look).

Even if you increase the height of the small caps, they won’t look good (you could try yourself by writing a sentence in ALL CAPS and lowering the font-size of some letters ALL CAPS). It may look good if the small caps are only slightly smaller than the real caps but then the small caps are hard to identify as such and it looks like a fault and not like small caps.

Faked small caps will look bad all the time and you could only get a decent result with a small caps font.

Maybe the current value was set with the intention, that you could clearly see that the result looks wrong. So you could use small caps as a style while writing your document and sent it to your publisher that will replace the ugly thing with a real small caps font. At the same time, it will prevent you from using it for real prints because it looks so ugly (even if this wouldn’t keep off most people from printing them anyway).

[Mart°n]

long mail, short answer: first of all, the small caps "M" is not as high as the "m", or the middle length of other small letters like "i" etc. It is a fact that you can easily check when enlarging the result and drawing a vertical line.

I have checked this, posted a picture and some sentence about it in the post above. I’ve done the same with the letter “M” and the same fonts used in the fake small caps example above:



As I already wrote and am happy to repeat here, the fake caps M only is smaller than the lowercase m in some fonts, not all. It is bigger when used with Garamond and Times, for example. So the “fact” comes and goes with the selection of another font.

Secondly, do you seriously believe what you say in your quote? Seems to be too childish.

Maybe it sounds childish because I’m a child ?
It’s nothing I could believe or disbelieve because it was a guess. That’s the reason I began the sentence with “Maybe”. I the past, I have found the Redlers to have a good sense for typography related problems and they even wrote their own text-engine to solve some of those, especially with languages like Hebrew and some Arabic ones.

When I first saw the fake caps feature in a beta of Mellel, I couldn’t believe how ugly they look (because the fake caps are to small) and I wondered, how this could be. Why would someone (the Redlers) choose such a scale factor for shrinking the small caps to a level that doesn’t look good with any font.
I haven’t found an answer, the things wrote in my last post are simply a guess, a possible answer.
I haven’t created the fake caps feature nor do I want it in any way. I could see what you mean, could see that they look ugly and have seen better implementations in other applications. But as I don’t use this feature, it doesn’t hurt me at all (sounds selfish and so it is).

All of us who have to use fake small caps do not use them because they think they look good but because they have to.

I know, that some people have to use small caps (fake or not) because they have to deliver their work formatted in a special pre-defined, enforced style. In my view (as someone that isn’t trapped in such a system) it’s a bad solution to force the authors of some software to implement fake caps even if everyone with the smallest sense of typography knows and sees that they look ugly, no matter what you do. It only treats symptoms instead of solving the problem. If highly educated people do something really bad even if they know how to do it better, how would you call that?

You and some others are forced to use fake caps and use them because you have to. Others see the option, think “that’s cool” and use fake caps because it’s possible. I’ve seen tons of fake caps used in cases where no one has forced the creator to use them (not to speak of fake italics…). So I won’t believe the sentence “All of us… because they have to” above. Some, maybe some more but not all.

Please do not misunderstand me. I know what you are speaking of and I agree that the fake caps are to small. The last I want to do is to disgruntle or attack you personally. I only wanted to clarify things (mostly the Mm thing)

I do not need typographical education.

That’s fine, so I stop here.

[mwdiers]

I realize that this is a hack, and hacks are to be avoided. However, in reality, the current fake small caps code is a hack, so why not make it a better hack?

Why can't Mellel's small caps case feature use OpenType small caps characters if they are available, but if not, then fake it? I mean, isn't this exactly what is required? This would completely solve every problem in this thread. It would be typographically correct when possible, but when not, it would still work (such as with Courier).

This would not break the existing OpenType implementation. Anyone can continue to use the OpenType feature, and create all this themselves, or they can use the Mellel SmallCaps feature, and it will be done for them - the right way - every time.

As an option: a checkbox to "Force all fake smallcaps". This would turn the current 2.1.2 behavior back on if anyone actually wanted such a thing (and I can't imagine why they would).

Am I missing something here?

And by the way: the same thing should be done for Superscripts and Subscripts. Implement a Mellel implementation that automatically uses them if they are available, but if not, then fake it.

[TLS]

Why can't Mellel's small caps case feature use OpenType small caps characters if they are available, but if not, then fake it?

[...]

And by the way: the same thing should be done for Superscripts and Subscripts. Implement a Mellel implementation that automatically uses them if they are available, but if not, then fake it.

This is precisely what InDesign does, so I really don't understand why Mellel cannot.

[Ori Redler]

Ori,
I would like to hear your opinion about the fact that Fake Small Caps letters have a lower height in their middle length than real letter (sorry I cannot express myself typographically correct in English, here is an example: )

"m" has height x, the face small cap "M" should have the same height x, but in fact has x-something. This should not be and looks even worse. I asked at another place about this but did not see an answer yet.

I would very much like to know whether this is intended and to receive a comment about whether you plan to change this (x or even x+something would look OK)

Maria

Maria, the setting is for 0.7 of the ascent-decent height of a character. Checking with some OT fonts, this is also the setting used with "real" small caps.

[Ori Redler]

Still, if you need to have the upper case as capitals and the lower case as small caps, all you need to do is apply "All small caps" OpenType feature and the Small Caps feature. The result is just what you want...

Well I fear that's just not what you want. As you can see in the screen shot below, with your solution, the big caps in Mellel are bolder than the small caps. That's just not what you want with small caps. As the screen shot shows, TextEdit, however, does it right.

The big caps are not bolder and actually cannot be bolder, because they are the same thing...

[mc7121]

Still, if you need to have the upper case as capitals and the lower case as small caps, all you need to do is apply "All small caps" OpenType feature and the Small Caps feature. The result is just what you want...

Well I fear that's just not what you want. As you can see in the screen shot below, with your solution, the big caps in Mellel are bolder than the small caps. That's just not what you want with small caps. As the screen shot shows, TextEdit, however, does it right.

The big caps are not bolder and actually cannot be bolder, because they are the same thing...

I'm sorry for obviously describing the phenomenon not precisely enough. It's not that the big letters (T and N in this sample) are bolder. But the stroke width is "bolder" since the faked big small caps letters are simply scaled. Real big small caps letters have the same stroke width as small small caps letters. That's why text in faked small caps looks pretty ugly. That's what my screenshot shows. Look at it from a few steps' distance and you'll notice that the big letters in the first line (Mellel) stand out while they don't do that in the second line (TextEdit). This is the same effect you'll notice when reading the document in print.

I know it's minutia and there are pobably more important things to solve (like cross referencing) but I just wanted you to be aware of this glitch. It's about making a very good product even better.

Regards
Marc

[Mart°n]

Maria, the setting is for 0.7 of the ascent-decent height of a character. Checking with some OT fonts, this is also the setting used with "real" small caps.

The 0.7 value may be adequate for “real” small caps but faked ones appear too small and therefore are not a pleasure to look at.

[Ori Redler]

Maybe we’re talking about two different horses here.
Using OpenType › All Small Caps and Character Case › Small Caps will of cause lead to so some sort of mixed caps but the result is not satisfying at all. Let’s look at a picture:

Using OpenType Small Caps and the Case › Small Caps setting leads to a shrinked font as you’ve mentioned in (A). If you compensate this by increasing the font size (which is a terrible workaround, by the way) the big capital letters look too bold compared to the small caps. The stroke width with whom both are painted is not the same. The result looks like a bold version of faked small caps. If you apply the same settings to a whole sentence, it looks even worse:

Not only the big capital letters look like bold versions but also some puntuation (the apostrophe in the example) looks really bad.

Martin, I’ll try to answer this one thing at a time.

A. Bad-bad apostrophe: The apostrophe looks bad because it looks bad. It looks bad in TextEdit:



And in Mellel:



Regarding the "bold" appearance: this is a mirage. For example, let's take this example:



The text as Mellel lays it out clearly seem bolder, especially when we compare the two "L"s there.

Now, let's do some controlling of this by equalising the height of the "L"s in both samples:



As you can see, the "L"s in Mellel are identical, whereas with the regular setting for this the small caps "L" is in fact bolder -- Just the opposite of how it seems.

[Ori Redler]

Maria, the setting is for 0.7 of the ascent-decent height of a character. Checking with some OT fonts, this is also the setting used with "real" small caps.

The 0.7 value may be adequate for “real” small caps but faked ones appear too small and therefore are not a pleasure to look at.

All "fake" small caps are based on this or other arbitrary decision, because applications do not actually check the x height or the m height or anything. The question is if this arbitrary decision we've made to use 0.7 is in fact what you'd get with most "real" small caps or not. Comparing this with Mellel and MS Word, I think we hit the spot with 0.7.

[transalpin]

What I’d love to see in 2.1.3 is the addition of an OpenType Small Caps option:


Would it be very difficult to implement?

[Mart°n]

Thanks for you answer, Ori.

While some of the things you‘ve mentioned are “right” in terms of technical characteristics, I think the point of view from whom we both started our arguments are quite different.

A. Bad-bad apostrophe: The apostrophe looks bad because it looks bad. It looks bad in TextEdit:

And in Mellel:

It’s not that I don’t like the apostrophe itself, I think it is quite O.K. but what I liked to show on my example above is the bigger size of the apostrophe if it is used with your OpenType/FakeSmallCaps option.
Here’s another picture:



The options I’ve applied to the text are highlighted inside the picture. Both examples have been prepared in Mellel and the first one is what you’ll get in TextEdit if you choose “Small Capitals” while all the characters are selected. In this case, the UpperCase letters stay the same as all the punctuation marks do.
Because one have to compensate the size of the OpenType/FakeSmallCaps option you’ve suggested, not only the letters were scaled up but also punctuation marks, and that’s what I think looks terrible. If I have to apply your hack only to letters but not punctuation marks, I also could select only the lowercase letters an apply the OpenType/All Small Caps option (if this is applied to the punctuation marks, they won’t change.)

This is not only important if you like to use SmallCaps for a headline but even more, if you use SmallCaps as an inline style attribute as you could do with an italic font face.

Let’s look at one more picture:



The first line shows the sentence in mixed case. If I now like to display the Author’s name in Small Caps, it should look like the example in line 3. Line 2, however shows the result how it will look with the OpenType/FakeSmallCaps hack. Not only the upper case letters stand out of the overall appearance but also the dot after M. and the apostrophe are bigger than they should be (and are in the surrounding text). So there’s something wrong.

Regarding the "bold" appearance: this is a mirage. For example, let's take this example:



The text as Mellel lays it out clearly seem bolder, especially when we compare the two "L"s there.

Now, let's do some controlling of this by equalising the height of the "L"s in both samples:



As you can see, the "L"s in Mellel are identical, whereas with the regular setting for this the small caps "L" is in fact bolder -- Just the opposite of how it seems.

What you did here shows your way of thinking to me, but I wonder why you haven’t just looked at the results.

Small Caps aren’t neither scaled down Caps nor shouldn’t scaled up Small Caps used as Caps. Small Caps are just that, small (lowercase) letters with the shape of the uppercase ones. They are their own thing as lowercase letters are.
No one (I know of) ever had the idea to write a sentence in Mixed Caps, then take the lowercase letters, scale them up until their height matches the uppercase ones only to say: “the lowercase w is wrong because if you scale it up to the size of the uppercase one, you clearly could see that it’s much too bold”



Even if this is true, it is so, becasue it intended. What printed type tries to achieve, is to reproduce the appearance of written style (more or less) in a perfect way. One characteristic of written text is that all letters (uppercase, lowercase, punctuation, superscript, subscript) feature the same width of the used pen (fountain pen, calligraphic pen, pencil, ball pen, brush…)



As you could see, I’ve written the word Mellel twice. One time with lowercase styled lowercase letters and a second time with uppercase styled lowercase letters. The stroke width is the same as I’ve used the same pen:



By doing this, the Small Caps look smooth and would integrate themselves just fine in any written text.
If I take a Small Caps L from the Mellel example above, scale it up so that it’s height is equal to the uppercase M, it’s very clear, that it’s stroke width is bolder because it's scaled up in any direction.



There’s nothing new about this.

I don’t know how you read a book. Do you cut out all letters, sort them by uppercase and lowercase, scale the lowercase ones up to match the height of the uppercase letters and combine the whole thing to a book again?

So why would you do this with your Small Caps example above?

In case I couldn’t express myself good enought, I’ve found a nice article about the use of Small Caps on creativepro.com Back to Typographic Basics

Some sentence out of this:

Anemic Type
The other rude noise in the symphony hall that has become common is fake small caps. Small caps are wonderful things, very useful and sometimes elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination.

Fake caps are what you get when you use a program's "small caps" command. The software just shrinks the full-size capital letters down by a predetermined percentage – which gives you a bunch of small, spindly-looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps-and-small-caps – that is, small caps for most of the word but a full cap for the first letter – then it's even worse, since the full-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them.[…]

I'd advise everyone to just forget about the "small caps" command -- forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. […] You don't really need small caps at all, in most typesetting situations; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch.

If you're going to use them, then use real small caps: properly designed letters with the form of caps but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a little taller, and with stroke weights that match the weight of the lowercase and the full caps of the same typeface. Make sure you're using a typeface that has true small caps, if you want small caps. And letterspace them a little, set them slightly loose, the same way you would (or at least should) with a word in all-caps; it makes the word much more readable.

The important thing is: “… and with stroke weights that match the weight of the lowercase and the full caps of the same typeface”.

Small caps are an silent style as italics are. If you read a book and keep reading on the left page, you won’t notice silent style on the right one. So you wouldn’t see if there’s a word written in italic or small caps. The thing’s you’ll notice (even if you don’t look at them direclty) are loud styles. bold is one of them, colors, differnt fonts and bigger sizes are some other.

Each one of them have their permissons as everyone could fulfill a specific task (highlight important things [bold, colors], identify new chapters [headlines]) but silent styles shouldn’t be an eye catcher.
Unfortunately fake small caps and the option suggested by you (OpenType/FakeSmallCaps) draw attention because the lowercase letters are too light (fake small caps) or the uppercase letters are to bold (the hack).

Both are bad because they look bad. And that’s why I’ve asked why you haven’t looked at the results. They don’t look nice and they won’t fit into any surrounding text. The bold uppercase M and L of your example look like bold letters and bold is a loud style. They draw attention without any need. There’s not information hidden in the M or the L. The word (MELLEL) would be split in seveal pieces and could not be read as [one] word again. It’s like if you speak a sentence to someone but shout very loud on every uppercase written letter. The listener probably couldn’t follow you any longer and even if – he will be highly irritated. The same is true for both fake small caps variations (even if those won’t be noticed in the same way as shouting people).

The thing that counts when it comes to typography is readabilty and appearance (both depend on each other). If something looks bad, it’s very likely that its readability also is bad.

Here’s some more citation from Adobe’s OpenType User Guide where you could read about Small Caps (page 10) and All Small Caps (page 11):

Observe how these “faux” small caps look light and spindly next to the capitals, while the designed small caps match the appearance of their full-size siblings.

So the appearance is the important thing. The same is true for faked small caps. It doesn’t matter if they match the size of [insert your favorite Word Processor here] or if they match the size of the “other” lowercase letters. It’s important how they look when used alone and next to regular styled text and in this regard, they look ugly (which isn’t your fault as this is true for evey type of fake small caps, but it could be improved by making them slightly bigger to some level that makes their stroke width appear broader but still making them identifiable as small caps). I don’t vote for this as I haven’t voted for fake caps at all and I completely agree with the guy from creativepro.com: I'd advise everyone to just forget about the "small caps" command – forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. […] ; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch.
But that’s what Maria liked to say by writing “they are too small”.

Sorry for this long post (especially to modem users for excessive use of pictures) but I think it was necessary to explain some things.

The short version of this post has already been posted by transalpin:

What I’d love to see […] is the addition of an OpenType Small Caps option

[Mart°n]

While surfing throught the web, I’ve found a page nice recently that offers two OpenType fonts with real Small Caps for free.
One of the font is a sans serif one (Delicious), the other has small serifes (Fontin). Both contain several font faces as regular, italic, bold, small caps, one also contains a heavy face.

You could get them here:

http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/index.html

When selecting the download, choose the PC/OpenType one, because Mellel works best with OpenType fonts. Other Mac OS applications could use them to. The Type1 Download would also work on a Mac but is not supported as well as the OpenType one with Mellel.

Maybe this is of some interest for some readers of this topic.