|
|
Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/13/07 06:09
Scripsit Beauregard T. Shagnasty:
> He said "small caps", not "all caps'. <g>
The Subject line _only_ says "small caps", but that's apparently misleading.
It seems to me that the OP has text like "THE BENGAL TIGER" and he wants it
to be displayed as "The Bengal Tiger" using small-caps style (i.e. with
lowercase letters like "a" rendered using shapes similar to the
corresponding uppercase letter though smaller). So there are two distinct
issues here.
In HTML, there's nothing for either purpose. In CSS, you can use
text-transform to convert text to uppercase, to lowercase, or to capitalized
(first letter in capital). The problem in the OP's case is that
text-transform: capitalize does not affect uppercase letters at all - it
only converts the first letter of each word from lower to upper case. (Note
that this isn't the same as title case in English usage: text-transform:
capitalize affects _all_ words, including articles and prepositions.)
Thus, even the first part of the job implies that it cannot be performed in
CSS. The textual content needs to be change - and then you could probably
just as well change it to the desired spelling ("The Bengal Tiger").
> Should probably be { font-variant: small-caps; } but I've never been
> able to make it work reliably, if at all.
It actually works pretty well technically up to a point. People just often
misunderstand the idea. It's supposed to affect the choice of font variant,
ideally using a small-caps variant of the font. Such a variant has probably
uppercase letters similar to those of the basic font but lowercase letters
as similar to uppercase letters but in a size that is somewhat larger than
the x-height of the basic font. Very few fonts commonly available on
people's computers contain small-caps variants of fonts; such variants
typically exist for quality or "expert" fonts only, used in high-quality
typography.
So what happens in practice is that browsers simulate small-caps by using
reduced-size versions of capital letters. This results in inferior quality,
as yoi can learn from a textbook on typography. To compensate for the
problems, browsers don't reduce the size very much. This, on the other hand,
creates insufficient size contrast between uppercase and lowercase letters,
so that they look rather similar unless you look carefully, i.e. the text
may _appear_ to be in all uppercase.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|