On the appropriateness of small-cap-specific symbols

mauro sacchetto
mauro sacchetto Posts: 395
edited October 27 in Font Technology
Some fonts (such as EB Garamond) include additional punctuation (question marks, exclamation marks, etc.) and other characters (parentheses, braces, guillemets, etc.) designed specifically for small caps; these appear smaller to match the height of the small caps themselves:

In reality, most fonts (e.g., Garamond Premiere, Brill) do not make this distinction, partly because these symbols are intended to serve both uppercase and lowercase text.
What is your take on this? Is it advisable to have specific versions of certain symbols—such as exclamation and question marks—for use with small caps to ensure visual consistency within the text, while perhaps omitting such specific versions for other symbols?
Thank you
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Answers

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,897
    I would consider including smallcap exclamation mark and question mark, for potential use in running headers, which are often set in smallcaps. If parenthetical or quotation marks, including guillemets, occur in such a situation, adjusting the height of the default glyphs is usually adequate.
  • mauro sacchetto
    mauro sacchetto Posts: 395
    edited October 27
    One detail: if I scale down the question mark and exclamation mark, the dot in both glyphs will also be scaled down proportionally. Should the period and comma - whose "head" is generally identical but slightly larger - also be adjusted, or should they be left as they are (i.e., as they appear in "normal," non-small-cap text)? If I don't adjust them, a noticeable size difference might arise, especially if two short sentences follow one another, one ending with a question or exclamation mark and the second with a period. Or am I overthinking this?

    PS Actually, I’ve already planned to position the *quoteright* (the apostrophe, which appears very frequently in Italian) lower down, aligned with the top of the small caps.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,897
    edited October 28
    I would adjust the size of the dot in the smallcap exclamation and question mark to the weight of the smallcaps, not to their size. So I would begin with that adjustment, which means making the dot slightly smaller than the default one, and then adjust the size of the shape above it vertically as necessary to ensure a reasonable gap between it and the dot.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,537
    Another thing to consider is that it might be useful to have full size punctuation retained for small-caps settings and downsized punctuation for "caps-to-small-caps" settings.
    In the former, caps are big and something like (Cʀᴀɪɢ) probably demands a tall open parenthesis before the capital C. But with c2sc any glyphs that depart from the consistent small-caps height really jump out. 

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,897
    Oh, I would definitely only map smallcap punctuation in the c2sc feature, and not in the smcp feature. They are only appropriate in all-smallcaps setting.
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 101
    edited October 28
    I’ve tried to fine-tune some details in Garamontio (a fork of EB Garamond that I use for testing) regarding smcp and c2sc. Fractions can be generated even when smcp and c2sc are applied.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,897
    If find the height overshoot of the smallcap ! and ? distracting. I think one should aim for these to have the same vertical relationship to the smallcaps as the full size versions have to the caps, so they don’t stand out.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,074
    FWIW, my standard set for all-small-caps punctuation is ! ¡ ? ¿ ( ) [ ] { } ' " ’ ” / \ &
    Implemented only in {c2sc} as Craig and John advocated above.
    Coincidentally, I started including the quote marks after a request from an Italian publisher with their desire to have better-behaved apostrophe and not have to manage manually throughout. 
    As it happens, that was still in the Postscript days, so I made up a special SC font for them with these lowered quotes. OpenType makes it easier to have it both ways for U&SC vs. all-SC.
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 101
    edited October 28
    @John Hudson Thanks for pointing that out. Those characters (!?) in the small caps set are still the original ones from EB Garamond. I will try to adjust their size relative to the other letters.

    Edit: Experiment

  • pereelmagne
    pereelmagne Posts: 18
    I totally agree with the need of providing single quotes and guillemets aligned for c2sc feature. In Catalan the situation is the same as in Italian. Words with articles would be, for instance: “l’ham”, “d’or”.

  • Erik
    Erik Posts: 39
    mauro sacchetto said:
    the apostrophe, which appears very frequently in Italian
    pereelmagne said:
    In Catalan the situation is the same as in Italian.
    Of course both these assertions are correct; but I point out that the apostropheʼs use is also common in the very language weʼre all writing in…!
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 147
    One more thought: personally, I have no use for small-cap-sized numerals. I use normal oldstyle numerals with small caps, as has been done for five hundred years. Presumably someone wants them, since they seem to be getting more common in text faces. But I find them to be a nuisance, especially if they are automatically activated by the "all-small-caps" attribute. For instance, in Lyon, which I have been using extensively for years, I need to use GREP styles to override this behavior and impose OS figures on SC text. I will shortly be working with my web developer to do the same in our CSS code.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 147
    Thanks for this, Kent. This seems like a sensible way to program things — perhaps, dare I say, more sensible than the approaches taken in various other commercial text faces I've encountered.

    Also, congratulations on your latest release and the launch of your website, which I've just been browsing. I don't have a source for the Walton quotation, but it is reminiscent of a line of Oscar Wilde's; see below:

    https://www.oscarwilde.us/quotations/america/took-out-a-comma.html
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,074
    Joshua — Thanks for the Wilde quote. Yes, it has a similar sense to it, doesn’t it? Well noted.

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