10 Facts About Small caps

In typography, small caps are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures.

Small caps are used in running text as a form of emphasis that is less dominant than all uppercase text, and as a method of emphasis or distinctiveness for text alongside or instead of italics, or when boldface is inappropriate.

Small caps 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.

Small caps are often used in sections of text that are unremarkable and thus a run of uppercase capital letters might imply an emphasis that is not intended.

In printed plays and stage directions, small caps are usually used for the names of characters before their lines.

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French and some British publications 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.

Research by Margaret M Smith concluded that the use of small caps was probably popularised by Johann Froben in the early 16th century, who used them extensively from 1516.

Small caps capitals are not found in all font designs, as traditionally in printing they were primarily used within the body text of books and so are often not found in fonts that are not intended for this purpose, such as sans-serif types which historically were not preferred for book printing.

Professional desktop publishing applications supporting genuine small caps include Quark XPress, and Adobe Creative Suite applications.

Small caps can be specified in the web page presentation language CSS using font-variant: small-caps;.