L l l.sc caron

Alfonso García
Alfonso García Posts: 7
in Font Technology
A simple doubt. l.sc goes better with caron.alt or the same caron as lower case?

Thank you!

Comments

  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 639
    I would say caron.alt, but I'm no expert. People probably expect smcps to look like caps also in the accent department.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 937
    Not to be flippant, but the answer is rather literal: the l.sc should appear as a small capital.

    Depending upon the degree of variation between capital L and small-cap L, you may be able to use the same accent component as the capital, or you might want to draw a small-cap variant. But the form of the accent should be the same.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,886
    edited January 2018
    Depends on the weight of the small caps, and the design of the cap accents (diacritics).
    - are the small caps closer to the weight of the caps, or of the lower case?
    - are the cap accents more "flattened" due to their position? If so, the lower-case accents are going to have a more appropriate shape

    So, if I have to pick one or the other, in most cases I would end up picking the lowercase accents to go with the small caps, but "it depends"

    If the weight of the small caps is significantly different from the lower case, but the height is close to the lower case, and the cap accents are flatter in design, I would likely have separate diacritics for the small caps.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 937
    But in this case, we’re specifically talking about lcaron (at least, I think) — which takes an apostrophe-like diacritic. So, maybe not so much about flattened/not flattened.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,886
    True enough! I was moving into the more general case. Yes, for Lcaron, it's just a question of which weight matches better.
  • Ben Blom
    Ben Blom Posts: 250
    edited January 2018

    The question suggests there are two sets of diacritics, one for lowercase and one for uppercase. When one includes small caps in a font, I think one should use a third set of diacritics for small caps.

    So, in a font that contains small caps, I use three different sizes of diacritics. An exception to this, is the special caron that looks like a raised comma. For this, I use the same one for the lowercase and uppercase (ascender height is usually not very different from caps height), but a smaller one for the small caps (small caps are significantly smaller than caps). For the standard caron, I use three different sizes (from big to small in height): for lowercase, uppercase, and small caps.

  • Alfonso García
    Alfonso García Posts: 7
    Thank you very much guys!

    Finally I've decided to use .alt to be similar to uppercase, as @Kent Lew says.

    Yes, @Ben Blom three sets of diacritics is very usefull.

    Good ítems to think of, @Thomas Phinney


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