smallcaps how to?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by dwig

Which the OP said he was using.

@JSWolf: I would think a simple font declaration in the CSS for a styled SPAN in combination with embedding the smallcaps font would work just fine. It should work much like the tags for bold and italic. It would work for any format/device that supported custom fonts and would gracefully fall back to C/LC when either the format lacked support for embedded fonts or the user disabled the use of embedded fonts in their reader.

You do know that you are answering a question from 2009 and it's 2016 now.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You do know that you are answering a question from 2009 and it's 2016 now.

Yes, but it was dusted off and brought forward will a lot of additional discussion that seemed to be taking a tangential direction so I was inclined to comment, more for lurkers and for you in particular as I would have expected you to have resolved this over a half decade ago.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by dwig

Yes, but it was dusted off and brought forward will a lot of additional discussion that seemed to be taking a tangential direction so I was inclined to comment, more for lurkers and for you in particular as I would have expected you to have resolved this over a half decade ago.

Yes, I have solved this long ago. I know a lot more about ePub now then I did back then.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dwig

Which the OP said he was using.

@JSWolf: I would think a simple font declaration in the CSS for a styled SPAN in combination with embedding the smallcaps font would work just fine. It should work much like the tags for bold and italic. It would work for any format/device that supported custom fonts and would gracefully fall back to C/LC when either the format lacked support for embedded fonts or the user disabled the use of embedded fonts in their reader.

MattMC was, if I am not wrong, commenting about Bentleymaniac's suggested solution using text-transform. He, MattMC, was correct when he said it wouldn't be a true smallcap. Even IF you could get that to work on ePUB2, which is still holding the day.

Not to wax poetic and all geezer-like, but there's an elegance to an actual smallcaps font variant that you simply don't get by squishing the full-size characters. This does not mean that we haven't all done it; gods know, I have, when I couldn't get a client to realize that the LookInside shouldn't be the driver for the layout, but...yowch. I don't like squishing.

Hitch

[mattmc]

Originally Posted by Hitch

MattMC was, if I am not wrong, commenting about Bentleymaniac's suggested solution using text-transform. He, MattMC, was correct when he said it wouldn't be a true smallcap. Even IF you could get that to work on ePUB2, which is still holding the day.

Precisely.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It will be true smallcaps if the software displaying the ePub uses true smallcaps from the font, as it should if it is available.

The lack of smallcaps support is entirely an implementation problem, rather than a standards one.

For sure. I'm not aware of a single ereader that properly reads from the smallcaps portion of an OTF when given the font-variant instruction.

In my experience, your font has to have actual small-caps glyphs in the lowercase letter slots, for this to be pulled off on the broad range of ereaders we try to support these days.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mattmc

For sure. I'm not aware of a single ereader that properly reads from the smallcaps portion of an OTF when given the font-variant instruction.

In my experience, your font has to have actual small-caps glyphs in the lowercase letter slots, for this to be pulled off on the broad range of ereaders we try to support these days.

This is correct. Current Readers cannot get to the small-caps in an OTF font unless the small-caps have replaced the lowercase letters.

But some fonts do have a small-caps variant so you can use that to get true small-caps. I know some SIL fonts have small-caps built-in tot he OTF, but somewhere on the SIL sight, you can take the font families and make small-caps versions out of it.