I’ve had a look around and going off of some old posts, getting real small caps programatically is difficult, perhaps even impossible. Is that still true? Faked small caps are just too ugly to be acceptable (and the font I’m using does have small caps).
If it’s not possible, I understand but as an alternative, perhaps adding the ability to give the specified initial number of words a special character style could be a workaround? (A bit of a kludge, admittedly, but I can reliably set small caps – or any other character decorations using that method.)
We experimented with using native small caps, font support allowing, from the Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ Make Small Caps menu command. It worked fine in Scrivener, but unfortunately Word reads typography differently from the Mac, and only a small subset of fonts worked with it. Ultimately the capability felt too unpredictable to be put into use.
That same underlying problem would be there for compile-based conversions as well. I fear we’d just end up with a lot of questions asking why when small caps is set, absolutely nothing happens—with the only reasonable answer being: try a bunch of different fonts and hope you find one you (a) like that (b) works.
Perhaps in an alternate perfect world where Word died off in the ’90s… well, I could stop there.
Well one thing worth noting is that Scrivener won’t remove typography unless the target font doesn’t support it. So one way of approaching this in a clean and flexible manner is:
Select the first few words in an example document in the Draft that would ordinarily get the setting applied to it.
Use the font palette to apply small caps typography to the selection.
Use the Format ▸ Style ▸ New Style from Selection… menu command. Create this as a Character style that doesn’t adjust the font.
And that’s all you have to do for typical word processing output. A style will preserve the formatting attributes of the marked text, and leave that text marked with the named style in your word procecssor. This has two advantages:
Those that can handle small caps will probably be using them out of the box.
If it or the compile format doesn’t (.docx), no biggie. You have the text styled, which means you can go into the word processor’s style modification mechanism and apply the small caps to the style. (That said, does Pages not even support character styles?!)
The other advantage of using styles for this is that if you do not want small caps sometimes (say eBooks, which generally rely upon faking it), then you can adjust your compile settings to override what this style does.
Of course it means manually setting the text—but that’s how this is typically done anyway. Otherwise you can end up with awkward stuff like the first six words of a seven word sentence.
