houkanshan
commented
11 years ago Small caps
Use real small caps; avoid fakes http://practicaltypography.com/small-caps.html
They’re a great alternative to bold or italic or all caps.
Most people have never seen real small caps. They’ve only seen the ersatz small caps that word processors and web browsers generate when small-cap formatting is used.
Compared to the other characters in the font, the fake small caps that result are the wrong height, and their vertical strokes are too light. Whereas with real small caps, the color and height have been calibrated to blend well with the normal uppercase and lowercase letters.
- Don’t click on the small-cap formatting box in your word processor. Ever. And don’t use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps. Ever. These options do not produce small caps. They produce inferior counterfeits.
- The rules for all caps also apply to small caps: use small caps sparingly, add letterspacing, and turn on kerning.
Bad news. If you want real small caps, you’ll have to buy them—they’re not included with any system font.
Sometimes, small caps come in their own font file that shows up separately in the font menu. So when you want small caps, you format the text with the small-cap font. Other times, small caps are included in the main font file as an opentype feature (named ‘smcp’).+ But either way, you can also use paragraph and character styles to apply small caps, and eliminate the tedium of finding them.
Some font like equity and concourse have separate sets of small-caps fonts with the letterspacing already baked in. This saves labor. It also allows you to get properly spaced small caps in any program, even those that don’t support OpenType features or letterspacing. (Including web browsers—see letterspacing for more.)
Head
Kerning
auto
The browser makes educated guesses about when to optimize for speed, legibility, and geometric precision while drawing text. For differences in how this value is interpreted by the browser, see the compatibility table.
optimizeSpeed
The browser emphasizes rendering speed over legibility and geometric precision when drawing text. It disables kerning and ligatures.
optimizeLegibility
The browser emphasizes legibility over rendering speed and geometric precision. This enables kerning and optional ligatures.
Letter spacing
Always add 5–12% extra letterspacing to text in all caps or small caps, particularly at small sizes.
Lowercase letters don’t ordinarily need letterspacing.
body text in printed documents (e.g., motions, research memos, letters) must always be set in black type. No exceptions.
on the web
But consider making body text on screen dark gray rather than black. Screens have more severe contrast than paper, and thus are more tiring to read at full contrast. This is because screens produce color by emitting light directly, whereas paper produces color by absorbing and reflecting ambient light.
Pro designers sometimes unfairly malign gradient fills as a signifier of amateur design. As with any design tool, they can be used well—or poorly. In the physical world, most of the color we see is essentially a gradient, because any directional light creates a change in brightness. So with type, a background gradient that gently changes brightness can give a naturalistic sense of light and dimensionality.
Alternate figures
lining figures
These are the most common kind of figures, and the ones you’re most likely to find in the default position of a font. Lining refers to the fact that top and bottom of the figures “line up.” Lining figures can be used in any situation. Lining figures are always the preferred figures to use within all caps text, because they come closest to cap height.
Oldstyle figures
Unlike lining figures, oldstyle figures are designed to look more like lowercase letters. The ones in oncourse (shown below) are all one height. But often, some are short (0, 1, and 2), some descend below the baseline (3, 4, 5, 7, and 9), and some ascend (6 and 8). You won’t be surprised to hear that oldstyle figures work best in lowercase body text.
Still, I won’t say that they’re inherently better than lining figures for that purpose. As with justified text, you’ll see it done both ways in professional typography. And in context, oldstyle figures sometimes look a little, well, old. So the choice is yours.
With caps, however, you should not use oldstyle figures. They look wrong.
Tabular & proportional figures
Tabular figures are set on a fixed width, so that every figure occupies the same amount of horizontal space (somewhat like a monospaced font).
Proportional figures are not likewise uniform: the figures are set on varying widths that suit the shape of the figure.
In body text, proportional figures are preferred, because they tend to have more even spacing and a more consistent appearance. But tabular figures are essential for one purpose: vertically aligned columns, like you find in grids of numbers.
That said, the default figures on many fonts—especially system fonts—are tabular lining figures, so they can move easily from your word-processing document to your spreadsheet.
Ordinals
Superscripted ordinals are tiny and hard to read. So the best policy is to avoid them. To do this, you have to adjust your word processor’s default behavior.
Some fancy professional fonts include specially designed superscript alphabets and alternate figures that remain legible at small sizes. Those are fine to use in ordinals, but they’re typically made available as opentype features. So you’ll still want to turn off any automatic ordinal shrinking performed by your writing tool.
Web & e-mail addresses
For a more usable web address, use an address-shortening service