I have actually already discussed this with Jeff in Orange County on support, so I know the answer. RTF doesn’t support small caps, so Scrivener doesn’t support small caps. Jeff argued that “Scrivener isn’t a full fledged formatting tool like Word, and it never will be. Scrivener really isn’t concerned with the presentation of the content. All of that is meant to be done later.”
Problem is, small caps is not a “presentation” thing. Proper manuscript format calls for small caps to be used for signs, buttons, labels, etc. and this is done at the “manuscript” level. Every time I compile, I have to search through my 600 page manuscript afterward in Word to find which words I need to place into small caps and it’s a short path to madness. My agent likes periodic updates of my work, so I compile probably a minimum once a fortnight.
My way of handling this now is that I embed a coded tag right before anything I want to small cap and then, after compiling, I search for the code, delete it, then set the following text in small caps but, as you can imagine, this is a bit of a pain and prone to human error.
If there is ANY WAY to support small caps, it would be greatly appreciated
Scrivener DOES support small caps. And there is a convert to small caps item on the Format > Convert menu.
And your small caps will be preserved when you compile to output formats that understand small caps. Compiling to Word .docx format is a case in point.
It sounds like your trouble is that you are compiling with rtf as your chosen output format and, as you were told, RTF format does not understand/support small caps (so that aspect of your formatting gets ignored in the output). But if it is true that rtf does not support small caps, then there is not something Scriv could possibly do about that. The good folk at Lit & Lat have no control over what the rtf supports.
Can you not simply compile to some other output format – one of the ones that does handle small caps?
Are you stuck with a particular font? I think the basic issue is that Word will fake Small Caps, italics and boldface in any font that doesn’t come with those variants. Since Scrivener supports SC, at least at the UI level, and Scrivener uses RTF as its internal file format, RTF will do the same if tweaked appropriately (Incidentally, Nisus Writer Pro also uses RTF as its native file format and fully supports SC in fonts like Times New Roman, which doesn’t have an SC variant). I’ve not tried, since that’s the kind of thing I’d deal with in NWP after export from Scrivener, so I don’t know what happens to SC text when you compile.
To me, if I was going to use SC, I’d choose a font that does include an SC variant.
