Small caps?

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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1

Hello,

First of all thanks for this great software!

I have two similar questions.

  1. How do I use small caps in Scrivener?

  2. I have a list of references in a Word document. The names of the authors are in small caps. When I copy a reference to Scrivener, the small caps are gone, the text is in normal caps. How to prevent this?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

2

Hi Tea, No Latte,

You probably know that every word processing software has its own formatting settings.

Sometimes, they don’t translate exactly into competing programs. This includes small caps.

You might have to highlight the references manually and reduce their font size by a point or two.

Check the compatibility between programs (using Google) before copying text.

Hope this helps.

sweet

3

Hello Sweet,

Thanks a lot for your answer.
But I am afraid I don’t really have an answer to my questions.

First of all, is it possible to use small caps in Scrivener?
Remind that small caps is not the same as caps with a smaller font size. See the Wikipedia link.

This Google book says it is possible, at least for titles. So I think small caps are also possible for the main text and for footnotes?

I understand that the Word formatting settings are different than the Scrivener settings. Is there another word processor that is compatible with Scrivener?

Thanks!

4

Using small caps font variants requires accessing the advanced typography features of the font, and we don’t have that programmed in yet, so at the moment it isn’t possible. What you would want to do is somehow format ranges of text that are meant to be small caps, in a unique and uniform manner. Something like using green text would work. Then after you compile and start to polish off the produced document, you could use Word’s ability to select all text with similar formatting and do a global swap of green for small caps.

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5

Hello Tea, No Latte,

I am a graphic designer and understand the difference between true small caps and trying to imitate them by reducing the font size of standard caps.

Here are some possibilities:

Solution 1: Open Office Writer is a free open-source word processor compatible with MS Word you might download and see if that works for you (Professionally, I use Adobe InDesign for page layouts)

Solution 2: Some high quality fonts contain small caps as part of their font glyph set - consider using them

Solution 3: Look for an all caps font - sometimes they contain small caps in their glyphs in place of lower case letters

Solution 4: Layouts of beginning chapter pages for novels, short stories, etc. that use small caps in the first sentence often substitute a similar font that contains small caps. 99.9% of your readers will not notice the difference or care if done well.

AmberV gave you an excellent filtering solution for isolating your intended small cap text before you compile your document.

Best wishes,
sweet

6

Thanks you both for the help!

I think I will use the method of AmberV, although it will take some time. It would be great if you could include this function if a future update.

A last question: is this already included in the Mac version?
Because I saw this sentence in a change list: “Fixed bug whereby using fake small caps in HTML or e-book compile would cause the tag to be placed around every small-cap character rather than around complete small-cap phrases, thus swelling HTML file size.”

7

The OS X text engine in general does indeed have access to advanced font typography. So if the font supports small cap glyphs they can be switched on via the typography palette. We just kind of get that for free, though it is a bit buggy as Apple hasn’t really touched it in nearly a decade. With Qt there is no such facility, which means we have to research how these typography variants are addressed at the technical level inside of the font, build code that can scan fonts for them, a UI to display and allow selection of the features of the font, and potentially optimisation again to keep things tidy. It’s quite a bit of work, which is why it isn’t there.

As for faux caps, yes that’s on the slate as well, and given how easy it is to make a big font little font function that will no doubt come quite a bit earlier. Of course, faux caps don’t look near as nice as a hand crafted font, but they’ll do in a pinch. They would be available as a format option for titles in the Formatting compile option pane, as well as for first-words in new sections, and as something you can manually apply via Format/Convert/.

8

I have a related question - and I don’t want to open a new thread unnecessarily, so apologies for the necro.

Is there a way to indicate small-caps formatting when compiling for .epub or .mobi?

I know these formatting options exist within those formats, but is there any way at present to set this up in Scrivener?

Example of Kindle small-caps formatting: http://extraordinarycommons.com/small-caps-for-the-kindle/

9

There’s not a specific small caps feature, but you could do this yourself by formatting it in the editor and then deselecting “Override text and notes formatting” in the Formatting area of compile. In the editor, put the text you want in all caps, then select all but the initial capital and reduce the font size. When you compile to an ebook format, that span will preserve the smaller font size for the small caps look in your ereader.

10

Hi, everyone! I’m sorry if this has been discussed before, but related topics are too old and mostly related to Mac.

Does Scrivener support true small caps? (Provided the font contains small caps flavour.)

If it does, how do I format a text to use small caps? :thinking:

Thanks in advance!

11

While the topic I’ve merged this into is old, it is still relevant, and in particular, so is this explanation for why there is still nothing for it:

An alternative I haven’t seen mentioned is that some fonts are themselves designed to look this way as their basic function, with no special features required. You might consider trying something along those lines, if you are working with the constraint of only using Scrivener and not formatting post-compile.

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12

Thanks, @AmberV !

On the meantime, I’ve found a workaround, so to speak. I can type text on MS Word’s Small caps and then Copy&Paste into Scrivener. Seems to work so far, although not perfectly.

13

My mistake, it looks like a Qt update a while back did add rendering support, and the Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ Make Small Caps menu command will use the RTF codes for small caps (and will fake it for fonts that don’t have them[1]).

There are some caveats:

  • If you use zoom in the editor they will look weird.
  • They aren’t cross-platform compatible because Apple uses proprietary codes for this and doesn’t read the RTF standards.
  • You would definitely want to make sure that they survive compile.

Okay, yeah, it is definitely faking it—at least with AGP:

The top sample shows what small caps in this font actually look like, on the lower line, compared with faking it on the first line. The kerning is bad on the first line, and the weights are uneven.

The lower sample is Scrivener using the same font and point size. One of these lines has point size adjustments made to the letters, and the other is using the transformations command, guess which one!

But, it is using the right RTF code. So long as that survives compile and gets into a tool that can use it properly, it’s not a really huge deal if the text looks sub-optimal in the text editor.

  1. Honestly, I’m not 100% sure it’s not always faking it, on account of how poorly it renders the good fonts I own. Adobe Garamond Pro for example looks like someone gave up figuring out how to parse TTF about 75% of the way through the job. ↩︎

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14

Nice! Thanks again. I’ll check the compile output as per your advice.