When I discovered there is something like Petite Caps within OT features, I thought it would be widely adopted. Petite Caps may be very useful to handle accronyms and camel words, besides adding another option to build hierarchies in complex documents. But it seems almost no one found the feature so promissing. Except for Mota Italic and me, I do not know any other foundry or designer to be using Petite Caps.
Do you know about other fonts with Petite Caps? Anyone does consider adopting this feature in the future? Finally, the lack of fonts using it may cause the feature to be removed from a future revsion of OT specification?
0
Comments
Edit: I can confirm that Mrs. Eaves OT does have petite caps within Regular (other weights), but they also supply a separate font file for those applications which cannot access the feature.
No. The only features that get deprecated from the specification are ones that have some fundamental problem, e.g. they introduce confusability between encoded characters. Most of those were removed a long time ago, although I recently submitted a proposal to deprecate the <hngl> feature.
What is true is that the small number of fonts using this feature is unlikely to inspire software makers to include user interface options for petite caps, but that is less of an issue, of course, with web typography.
I originally registered the petite caps features at the request of Emigre, who had included these in some of their Type 1 fonts and wanted to make sure that they could be carried over into OpenType.
The only way I can think of to accomplish that with a combination of only {smcp}, {pcap}, and {c2sc} is if one adopts the Adobe approach of having duplicates like A.sc and a.sc, then having {pcap} target A.sc -> A.pc. Which makes for a lot of redundancy in the glyph repertoire.
It also leads to the somewhat counterintuitive requirement to activate All Small Caps and Petite Caps simultaneously to achieve a Sc&pc setting. (Or apply {c2sc} & {pcap} directly if one is coding for web.)
Something has to give. I don’t think you can support all possible combinations; something has to be left to selective, manual formatting.
_____
Kent. Note that there are separate <c2pc> and <pcap> features, so in a CSS environment at least you could combine <c2sc> with <pcap> to get smallcap uppercase with petite cap lowercase.
See the illustration in the registered feature description:
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_pt.htm#pcap
With regard to petite caps vs stylistic sets, though, the former were registered long before the latter, back in the days when fairly few OpenType fonts were in circulation, and no one was entirely sure how everything was going to work. One of the concerns expressed during the OT 'jamboree' at Microsoft in 1997 was that designers had been putting some novel stuff into alternate Type 1 fonts, and how these were going to translate to OpenType. The thinking at the time tended towards specialised features for particular variants — ergo, the daft slashed zero feature —, so when Zuzana asked about petite caps I wrote up the feature descriptions and registered them.
Since then, I've become much more interested in how to generalise features. For example, one such idea I've had, but not done anything about yet, is a 'Enhanced Legibility Forms' feature that would provide a standard way to access variants of any potentially confusable characters, rather than having a special feature just for the slashed zero.
For example, in a design with integrated Cyrillic, it might be worthwhile to have a small-cap height noticeably larger than x-height and to keep that consistent across scripts. For Latin, this height may also be quite useful for acronyms and such (think Fenway), as well as standalone C- or D-heads and such.
But then, for inline, lead-in small caps at the beginning of a section, it is often more harmonious to have a more traditionally sized small cap closer to x-height — i.e., a “petite” cap, if you will.
Personally, I tend to think more in terms of mid-cap and small-cap, but that’s just semantics. My point is, two sizes of smaller caps can have some value in complex publications.
Glyph coverage includes Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, and some of Latin Extended Additional. Fonts with Greek glyphs also include Small/Petite Capitals for Basic Greek.
My Petite Capitals have a squarer aspect ratio than Small Capitals. The general principle being that apply Petite Capitals to lowercase should not change line length too much. Small Capitals are similar proportions to Capitals.
I think that users can use features however they wish. The font designer's job is just to decide on how to design the glyphs (with some particular use in mind perhaps), but not to prescribe how they should be used.
1. A large Drop Capital with one or more words in Petite Capitals at the start of a paragraph
2. A few words in Petite Capitals in a Glossary or Bibliography
3. The same with Small Capitals