3 ms·
Small caps are actually a solution to the problem of otherwise uneven proportions created by capital letters only occupying the upper half of the letters body a
by Puts 5y ago
Small caps are actually a solution to the problem of otherwise uneven proportions created by capital letters only occupying the upper half of the letters body and a good way of creating a "boxy" layout with text.
Here's an example
https://jsfiddle.net/y4uk07jL/1/ https://jsfiddle.net/y4uk07jL/1/
If you want the box exactly like the author in the blog post (don't really know why anyone would want that?) you can do that by adjusting the line-height.
I can recommend Ellen Luptons book Thinking with type. Turns out some typographic problems was actually solved long before CSS and even computers. :)
- chrismorgan 5y agoI think that depends on the font, and is mostly not going to be true. In the handful of fonts I’m trying, upper case is correctly centred each time (eyeballed only), and small caps is very visibly unbalanced.
- Puts 5y agoYes, it is going to depend on the font. All fonts don't have real small caps meaning the browser will just scale down the normal capital letters and not appropriately adjusting them to the x-height. Choosing a font is however not just about how it looks, it's also a technical decision. If you gonna print on a certain paper your font may need ink traps, if you want your font to appear centered you want a font that supports true small caps.
- chrismorgan 5y agoI think you may be missing my point: in all the cases I’m looking at, capital letters are centred vertically, not lowercase letters like x (that being what small caps will be tuned to) as you’re suggesting; synthetic or real small caps will make no difference.