Small caps

An acronym set in full capitals inside a paragraph is a stack of tall letters in a line of short ones, and the eye reads it as emphasis whether or not any was intended. Small caps solve that by giving the same letters roughly the height of the lowercase around them. The sentence keeps its even colour and the abbreviation stops raising its voice.

The word “drawn” is doing real work in the definition. True small caps are separate glyphs the type designer cut: shrinking a capital thins its strokes and narrows its proportions, so the type designer compensates by widening the letters and keeping the stroke weight of the lowercase. That is the whole difference between small caps and faux small caps, and it is visible as soon as the two sit side by side, because scaled capitals look pale next to the text they are embedded in.

In CSS the feature is reached through font-variant-caps. The value small-caps converts lowercase letters; all-small-caps converts capitals as well, which is the one to use for an acronym typed as NASA, since the markup keeps the real string for search, copy, and screen readers while only the rendering changes. Both map onto the OpenType features smcp and c2sc. If the font has neither, browsers synthesize the effect by scaling capitals, so the property never fails outright, it quietly degrades to the fake. This specimen’s own typeface is one of those: it carries no small-cap glyphs, so what the demo renders is the browser’s scaled approximation, and the caption says so.

Small caps belong to running text, in abbreviations, in the first few words after a drop cap, and in running heads. They are a poor choice for anything long, because a paragraph entirely in small caps loses the ascenders and descenders that make word shapes recognisable, which is the same reason all capitals reads slowly.