I'm interested in looking at fonts with the capital letters slightly
shorter than full height. Specifically text fonts for book printing.
Serif or sans. I am not specifying a subject matter. Here are a few
examples to clarify:
Marco
https://www.type-together.com/marco-fontGreta Text
https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/greta-textGentium Book
https://software.sil.org/gentium/Dolly Pro
https://www.underware.nl/fonts/dolly/features/In
the past decades I've looked at some of this kind of font, but I wasn't
interested and did not note or remember them. But now I am interested.
Is there a proper commonly-accepted term for these fonts? Is there a
good way to search or a good search term to use? Is there any kind of
existing list of this type of font somewhere? Failing any of these,
please feel free to list your favorites, if you don't mind. Thank you.
Comments
- fonts with the "regular" capital letters are on the short side (which you could describe as fonts with a "low cap height," or even fonts with a "tall x-height" coming from the other direction), or
- fonts equipped with smaller alternatives to the regular capitals (which you could describe as "small caps").
When we learn how to write letters in school, we often are taught to make capitals and ascenders the same height, and often 2x the x-height, but in typography neither of those ratios is very common. There's not really such a thing as "full height."In other words, one would generally describe a typeface with a “small/large x-height” or with “ascenders taller than cap height”.
(There are a very few types with ascenders shorter than cap height.)
To be really picky, one should probably mention both x-height and ascender height.
**
Notably, Greta was designed for newspapers, and that is likely a good genre to investigate for your purposes. I’ve designed several news text fonts, which I will take the liberty of promoting here, e.g. Goodchild (a “Jenson”), Pratt, and Worldwide.
Don’t forget the ITC versions of the classics, Garamond, Caslon, Cheltenham, etc.—ITC gave them the small-x treatment.
For a sans serif with big x-height, FF Clan really pushes it!
Rosetta's Skolar might fit.
Which is also what I would call them.
https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/4260/malabar
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Crimson+Pro?query=crimson
Hafringe - Extremely low UC
Ragil
Stopper
Meyravi
All have editable text fields for exploration.