Is there any precedence when typesetting small caps to use standard size non-small caps specific punctuation, at least with period, colon, and quotation marks? As a user is it best to have the option of basic punctuation designed/scaled to small caps proportions? I'm curious if there's any best practice or user scenarios where either/or is preferable?
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A small-caps period seems like a goofy idea to me. After all, the point of drawing dedicated small caps is that they aren't just scaled down versions of the caps.
That is also the way I do it. Otherwise, when you have mixed case, you may get a smcp next to a cap.
For all small caps (c2sc), you have to decide whether there is any benefit in having the setting resemble a scaled-down all (full) caps setting, with, for instance, shrunken, lowered quote marks. I usually leave them alone; after all, the comma extends beyond the baseline, so default quotes balance that nicely in all-small-caps.
Small versions of the question and exclamation marks, and ampersand, may seem obvious, but are a bit of a luxury as they are so rarely required in all-small-cap settings, so may be omitted. But perhaps I am mistaken on this and will shortly be corrected by Kent Lew!
Well, I don’t know that I would characterize them as a luxury and “so may be omitted.” These SC punctuation are certainly not frequently needed, but are also not rare. I don’t have time right now to track down some real-world examples. Maybe later today.
As with many things in type, I think such possibilities are design-dependent (and perhaps destination-dependent) and consideration should be given each time and consciously decided, one way or the other.
As a side note, although the standard approach for FB (and other foundries, I believe) is to include any ampersand.sc substitution only in {c2sc} for All Small Caps, for Matthew Carter fonts I always include it in {smcp} at his request. He admits that this is driven largely by his preference for how he likes this in the setting of his company’s name. ;-)
Doing something like this is good. Otherwise if a user selects mixed-case text and applies c2sc (caps to small caps) only, they get initial small caps followed by lower-case text, which is almost certainly undesirable.
Arguably the layout c2sc feature should have been defined differently in the first place, but we were just trying to come up with the best app implementation given what was there.
Agree, I never seen (except of TRADEMARK names) someone use only Capitals to Small Caps in a regular text. So I was surprised that OpenType specification didn't provide a combined feature (something like ascp) that some graphics and text editors provide.
Not Adobe apps, though.
— Some customers don't even know what a c2sc feature is, and some — what a Stylistic Set is.
I think, that's why some foundries provide additional font styles like a "Familyname Small Caps" and "Familyname All Small Caps" etc, where these versions use the default glyphs, without features.