How do you set Caps and Small Caps text

[Artworx]

How do you set caps and small caps text. Is there a style or feature that does this automatically, or is it necessary to set manually.
Thanks
Lew

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Lew, do you mean how to change from upper to lower case? If so just select the text required & Ctrl + W

[mwenz]

Lew,

Xara products are not OpenType aware. What this means is that any OpenType or TrueType with true small caps cannot be accessed. If you have an older font with a small cap varient, you can use them.

Else you can do what I have done the few times I didn't want to leave XDP just to do a headline or two's worth of small caps. Now with character styles in the last couple versions is speeds up the process a tad.

In the screen shot below, I highlighted a bit of text that is to be small caps, hit ctrl+w as mentioned, adjusted the point size to about 80% of the point size for the real cap characters, then created a character style as seen in the screen shot. After that I can highlight some text, hit ctrl+w, apply the character style. All really quick if you don't need a lot of text.

Mike

[gwpriester]

You can also purchase a font that is small caps such as this font http://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/g...ssico/roman-sc (plus there are a few included in the Google selection). I think you can filter for these in the Add sub-menu.

In the past, some software offered simulated small caps, as well as simulated bold face and italics even though these were not part of the font's character set.

But this practice has been discontinued by most companies.

[Egg Bramhill]

Ah! I obviously misunderstood. Could someone give me a link to these caps styles or variants or whatever? I'm mystified now

[mwenz]

I don't know what you would like from a link.

The screen capture below has true small caps on the top line, the bottom line is made from reducing the size of capital letters. What you should note is the "weight" of the characters. True small caps (whether as a different font in the same family, or as accessible in a single OpenType font as I am using for the screen shot) will have the stroke weight the same as the capitals. Next to the work-around, it is an obvious difference.

This is only one small reason why XDP needs to become OpenType-aware.

Mike

[gwpriester]

Support for glyphs would be nice too.

Egg - With fonts with true caps and small caps, the small caps have been designed to have the same weight as the large caps. Faked small caps just make the small caps a few point sizes smaller so proportionately the weights are not the same.

If you want to see a font that is caps and small caps, follow my link in my last post. The font is Garamond Classico.

[Acorn]

Here is a play piece (more for web sites) that uses CSS3's font-variant: small-caps to create a faux Small Caps solution.

CSS3 - Small Caps.web

Acorn

[Artworx]

Finally read all of your responses! This info helps very much, now I have some ideas about how to approach the typesetting technique in the future. Thanks very much!! Lew