In typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the, small capitals (usually abbreviated small caps) are uppercase Capital letters or majuscules are the larger of two type faces in a script. In the Roman alphabet they are A, B, C, D, etc. They are also called capitals (caps) or upper case (uppercase). The latter name comes from manual typesetters, who kept them in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type case, while keeping the more frequently used (capital) characters A grapheme is a fundamental unit in a written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase Lower case , minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case (small) letters or text figures Text figures are numerals typeset with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the name. This stands in contrast to lining, or titling figures, which are all of consistent height. They are used in running text to prevent capitalized words from appearing too large on the page, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy. It is distinct therefore from oblique type, in which the, or when boldface A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on “blackness” is the use of italics, where the text is written in a script style, or the use of oblique, where the vertical orientation of all letters is slanted to the left or right. With one or the other of these techniques , words can be highlighted without making them stand out much from is inappropriate. For example, they can be used to draw attention to the opening phrase or line of a new section of text, or to provide an additional style in a dictionary entry where many parts must be typographically differentiated.

Typically, the height of a small capital will be one ex In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the distance between the baseline and the mean line in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font , as well as the u, v, w, and z. (Curved letters such as a, c, e, m, n, o, r and s tend to exceed the x-height slightly, due to overshoot.) However, in modern typography,, the same height as most lowercase Lower case , minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case characters in the font; classically, small caps were very slightly taller than x-height.[citation needed] Well-designed small capitals are not simply scaled-down versions of normal capitals; they normally retain the same stroke weight as other letters, and a wider aspect ratio The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. That is, for an x:y aspect ratio, no matter how big or small the image is, if the width is divided into x units of equal length and the height is measured using this same length unit, the height will be measured to be y to facilitate readability.

Many word processors A word processor is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of printable material and text formatting systems include an option to format text In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language in caps and small caps; this leaves uppercase letters as they are, but converts lowercase Lower case , minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case letters to small caps. How this is implemented depends on the typesetting system; some can use true small caps associated with a font, making text such as "Latvia joined NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO (pronounced /ˈneɪtoʊ/, NAY-toe; French: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord ), also called the "(North) Atlantic Alliance", is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The NATO headquarters are in Brussels, on March 29, 2004" look proportional, but most modern digital fonts do not have a small-caps case, so the typesetting system simply reduces the uppercase letters by a fraction, making them look out of proportion. (Often,[citation needed] in text, the next bolder version of the small caps generated by such systems will match well with the normal weights of capitals and lower case, especially when such small caps are extended about 5% or letterspaced a half point or a point.)

Contents

Uses of small caps

Small caps are often used for text that is all uppercase; this makes the run of capital letters seem less jarring to the reader. For example, the style of many American publications, including the Atlantic Monthly The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. Though based in Boston, it quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets, and encouraging major careers and USA Today USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the paper, is to use small caps for acronyms Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These components may be individual letters or parts of words (as in Benelux). There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various terms (see nomenclature), nor on written usage (see orthographic styling). While popular and initialisms Acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These components may be individual letters or parts of words (as in Benelux). There is no universal agreement on the precise definition of the various terms (see nomenclature), nor on written usage (see orthographic styling). While popular longer than three letters[citation needed]; thus: "U.S. ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language" and "FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war. The only American president elected to more than two terms (he was elected to four but only served three full terms, dying in his" in normal caps, but "nato" in small caps. The initialisms "ad Anno Domini and Before Christ (abbreviated as BC or B.C.) are designations used to label years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The calendar era to which they refer is based on the traditionally reckoned year of the conception or birth of Jesus, with AD denoting years after the start of this epoch, and BC denoting years before the start of", "bc Anno Domini and Before Christ (abbreviated as BC or B.C.) are designations used to label years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The calendar era to which they refer is based on the traditionally reckoned year of the conception or birth of Jesus, with AD denoting years after the start of this epoch, and BC denoting years before the start of", "am The 12-hour clock is a time conversion convention in which the 24 hours of the day are divided into two periods called ante meridiem and post meridiem (p.m., Latin: "after mid day" English: "after noon"). Each period consists of 12 hours numbered 12 (acting as zero), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11", and "pm" are often smallcapped as well.

Small caps are usually used in printed plays for the names of characters preceding their lines. Characters' names may also be printed in small caps in stage directions, particularly in older publications.

Small caps are commonly used for showing keyboard shortcuts; for example, "The keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh (1984), the AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1986), SCO UNIX, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows ( for small caps is Ctrl+Shift+K."

The capitalization of the name of the UNIX Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit operating system An operating system is the software on a computer that manages the way different programs use its hardware, and regulates the ways that a user controls the computer. Operating systems are found on almost any device that contains a computer with multiple programs—from cellular phones and video game consoles to supercomputers and web servers. Some was originally "Unix", but was typeset in early technical documents in small caps, until the all-caps typesetting stuck.[1]

Perhaps the most common use of small capitals is in the rendering of the word "Lord" in many versions of the Old Testament The Old Testament is the collection of books that forms the first of the two-part Christian Biblical canon. The contents of the Old Testament canon vary from church to church, with the Orthodox communion having 51 books: the shared books are those of the shortest canon, that of the major Protestant communions, with 39 books of the Bible The Bible refers to collections of sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity. There is no single version: both the individual books and their order vary. The Hebrew Bible contains 39 books, while Christian Bibles range from the 66 books of the Protestant canon to 81 books in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. The oldest surviving Christian Bibles.[2] Typically, an ordinary "Lord" corresponds to the use of the word Adonai In Judaism, the name of God is more than a distinguishing title; it represents the Jewish conception of the divine nature, and of the relationship of God to the Jewish people and to the world. To demonstrate the sacredness of the names of God, and as a means of showing respect and reverence for them, the scribes of sacred texts treat them with in the original Hebrew, but the small caps "Lord" corresponds to the use of Yahweh Yahweh is the personal name of God in the Hebrew Bible, Jehovah in the English and Greek Bible. This form is a modern scholarly convention: Hebrew scripts write it as four consonants, rendered in Roman letters as YHWH, due to the fact that most alphabets, prior the Greek alphabet, did not display vowels, and required that vowels be mentally in the original; in some versions the compound "Lord God" represents the Hebrew compound Adonai Yahweh.

French and some British publications[citation needed] use small caps to indicate the surname by which someone with a long formal name is to be designated in the rest of a written work. An elementary example is Don Quixote Don Quixote (Spanish: Don Quijote ; English: /ˌdɒn kiːˈhoʊtiː/, see spelling and pronunciation below), fully titled The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha), is a novel written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes created a fictional origin for the story by inventing de La Mancha. Similarly, they are used for those languages in which the surname comes first, such as the romanization Mao Zedong Mao Zedong listen (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東; pinyin: Máo Zédōng; Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung; December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) was a Han Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and communist leader. He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His.

Some publishers' house styles A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for design and writing of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication or organization. Style guides are prevalent for general and specialized use, for the general reading and writing audience, and for students and scholars of the various academic disciplines, medicine,, such as those of Newsweek Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence. Newsweek is published in four English language editions and 12 and DC Comics DC Comics is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing division of DC Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner. DC Comics produces material featuring a large number of well-known, use small caps to refer to the name of their own publications inside the same or another publication.

In chemical names, optical isomers are distinguished with d- and l-, when using the d/l system A chiral molecule is a type of molecule that lacks an internal plane of symmetry and has a non-superimposable mirror image. The feature that is most often the cause of chirality in molecules is the presence of an asymmetric carbon atom. For example d-glyceraldehyde Glyceraldehyde is a triose monosaccharide with chemical formula C3H6O3. It is the simplest of all common aldoses. It is a sweet colorless crystalline solid that is an intermediate compound in carbohydrate metabolism. The word comes from combining glycerine and aldehyde, as glyceraldehyde is merely glycerine with one hydroxymethylene group changed.

The 2003 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices is a document issued by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) to specify the standards by which traffic signs, road markings (see lane), and signals are designed, installed, and used. These specifications include the shapes, colors, and, which specifies standards for road signs used in the United States, requires that cardinal directions (such as West) be displayed in small caps. This is thought to enhance readability.

The Bluebook The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, a style guide, prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. The Bluebook is compiled by the Harvard Law Review Association, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Currently, it is in its 19th edition. It is so named, a format used in the citation of legal materials, makes use of small caps in various citation forms.

The character of Death from the Discworld novels speaks only in small caps.

In CSS

Small caps can be specified in CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL using "font-variant: small-caps;". For example, the HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms

<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Jane Doe</span>
<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz</span>

renders as

Jane Doe.
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz.

Since the CSS styles the text, readers are still able to copy the normally-capitalized plain text from the web page.

Unicode

Although small caps are not usually "semantically important", the Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, the latest version of Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 107,000 standard does define a number of "small capital" characters in the IPA Extensions, Phonetic Extensions and Latin Extended-D ranges (0250–02AF, 1D00–1D7F, A720–A7FF). These characters, with official names such as LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL A, are meant for use in phonetic representations. For example, ᴘ (P) represents a semi-voiced Phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, phonation is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the definition used among those who study laryngeal anatomy and physiology and speech production in general. Other phoneticians, bilabial plosive [1].

As of Unicode 5.1, the only characters missing to allow representation of the full Latin alphabet in small capital Unicode characters are small capital versions of F, S, Q and X. The following table collects the existing Unicode small capital characters:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
ᴀ ʙ ᴄ ᴅ ᴇ - ɢ ʜ ɪ ᴊ ᴋ ʟ ᴍ ɴ ᴏ ᴘ - ʀ - ᴛ ᴜ ᴠ ᴡ - ʏ ᴢ

Additionally, the Phonetic Extensions range has superscript A subscript or superscript is a number, figure, symbol, or indicator that appears smaller than the normal line of type and is set slightly below or above it – subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps best known for their use in formulas, mathematical expressions, and "small capital" characters.

These "small capital" characters should not be confused with the Unicode Standard's typographical convention of using small caps for formal Unicode character names in running text. For example, the name of Ж (U+0416) is conventionally shown as CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ZHE.[3]

Criticism

George Eliot Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of eight novels, including The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in's essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"[4] is critical of Victorian novelists for using excessive small caps and for employing them in inappropriate contexts (such as using small caps in place of italics In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy. It is distinct therefore from oblique type, in which the to indicate emphasis).

See also

References

  1. ^ http://dict.die.net/unix/
  2. ^ Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers. 2003. p. 1046. ISBN The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering (SBN) code created by Gordon Foster, now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, for the booksellers and stationers W.H. Smith and others in 1966 0-8054-2836-4.
  3. ^ Appendix A, The Unicode Standard 5.2.0
  4. ^ "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", The Westminster Review (October 1856), Vol. 66 (old series), Vol. 10 (new series), pp. 442-461

External links

Typography terminology
Page Pagination · Recto and verso · Margin · Column · Canons of page construction · Pull quote
Paragraph Widows and orphans · Leading · River · Alignment · Justification
Character Ligature · Letter-spacing · Kerning · Majuscule · Minuscule · Small caps · CamelCase · Initial · x-height · Overshoot · Baseline · Median · Cap height · Ascender · Descender · Diacritics · Counter · Text figures · Subscript and superscript · Dingbat · Glyph
Font Serif · Sans-serif · Italic · Oblique · Emphasis (bold)
Classifications
Roman type Old style · Transitional · Modern · Slab serif · Sans-serif · Script
Blackletter type Textualis · Rotunda · Schwabacher · Fraktur
Gaelic type Angular · Uncial
Punctuation Hanging punctuation · Hyphenation · Quotation mark · Prime mark · Dashes
Typesetting Type design · Type foundry · Movable type · Calligraphy · Phototypesetting · Letterpress · Typeface · Font · Computer font · ETAOIN SHRDLU · Lorem ipsum · Punchcutting · Pangram
Typographic units Point · Pica · Cicero · Em · En · Agate · Measure
Digital typography Font formats · Typesetting software · Character encoding · Rasterization · Hinting

Categories: Typesetting | Typography

 

The above information uses material from Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Some facts may not have been fully verified for accuracy. [Disclaimers]
This page was last archived by our server on Sun Aug 1 05:07:16 2010. [ refresh local cache ]
Displaying this page or its contents does not use any Wikimedia Foundation's resources.
The owners of this site proudly support the Wikimedia Foundation.

[Hide]▼
[Hide]▲