It ends up in the stylesheet… Likely you’ll end up with less ereaders displaying it right.
On the other hand [I just though of it], the worse that could happen is that they will display at 100% their size. (They are caps – real caps – and will remain as such.)
Wanna try my resulting epub in your device?
SmallCapsTest.zip (3.5 KB)
Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that I’m not clear on how I would go about making Scrivener compile small caps to real caps with a custom class. My first priority is that I can type my MS normally, and then use only Scrivener compile functionality to transform the MS to a useable epub.
The good news is that any solution I come up with needs only work on my own device. I create these epubs only for myself, to revise, edit, and proofread. So any solution needs to work in Calibre Reader (which has already shown itself to handle both solutions), and on my Tolino.
Also, I haven’t yet tested this with epub3, have only compiled to epub2. Don’t know what the difference is, but perhaps what Scrivener does with small caps in epub3 is more compatible with my Tolino?
Since the ePub3 standard is over a decade old, generating ePub3 should be the norm by now. Catering for older e-readers is moot anyway as they can read the book fine and can get a NCX for navigation. Sigil has a plugin converting for ePub2 to ePub3…
How old is your Tolino?
Point taken. Will compile to epub3 from now on. Unfortunately, it does not make a difference to my Tolino. The thing is about 4 years old, I think.
Have checked on multiple e-reader apps on my phone, and all’s well there as well. Contacting Tolino support next. Perhaps I need a new device…
It is easy:
Go in the editor to a place where you have a word(s) that you wish be small-caps.
Replace that word(s) with real caps.
Select those words, and make them be 80% (or 75%) of the font size you are currently set for.
For example: if the original font size is 12pt, make it 9 or 10pt.
Then, with those words still selected:
→ Pick a color you like. (Unlike the settings in the previous screenshot, this is completely optional. You can do without the highlight box, but it makes it easy to see what’s done. No worries: it doesn’t compile as a box. It doesn’t compile at all.) Click OK in the color picker.
Click OK in the style dialog, that will create the new character attributes style.
Wherever you had planned to use small-caps, use real caps instead, and selecting the concerned words, apply that new style to the selection.
→ The downside of this approach is that if you have different font sizes across your project, the font size being set in pt and not in %, you’ll have to create a small-caps character attribute style specific to each of those situations.
Yes, indeed, I think you should do that before anything else.
It would be much more convenient for you to simply keep using Scrivener’s small-caps.
Not to (re)mention how, not relying on the CSS stylesheet for the span formatting, it compiles to an Epub that is compatible with more Ereaders, such as the style-sheet-ditching android Ereaders. – If you need it to be, that is.
Thanks for the very clear explanation!
That’s my thinking too, and the downside of needing a style for each font size in the project is also a factor (though a small one, as I use small caps in the body text only). So let’s first see what the Tolino people say.
