Small Caps Font Generator

[Dogmatix]

I would like to request a Small Caps font generation feature.

Background:
many OpenType fonts contain a set of true Small Caps glyphs which OpenType compatible applications can see and use, instead of cheating by shrinking the normal glyphs which looks awful. Unfortunately, although a few affordable publishing programs can do this (e.g. MS Publisher, Serif PagePlus), there are no affordable word processors which can. Even the latest version of MS Word cheats with shrunken glyphs, even though it supports some other OpeType features (e.g. stylistic sets, ligatures), and OpenOffice / LibreOffice eschew OpenType features in favour of their Graphite font rendering, for which only two fonts are available.

My suggested feature in Font Creator would do the following:
- scan the loaded font for OpenType small caps glyphs
- re-map these to the code points of their lower-case equivalents
- add 'Small Caps' or 'SC' to the font names
- save and install the thus newly generated small caps font.

Much easier than converting all the small caps glyphs in a font one at a time...

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It is already possible by a simple use of copy paste.

1. Open the font with the Small Capital Glyphs
2. Select and copy them to the clipboard (assuming they're already in A-Z order)
3. Select the lowercase glyphs
4. Paste (glyph contours and metrics are copied by default) overwriting the existing glyphs
5. Delete the now redundant Small Caps glyphs
6. Run the Autonaming wizard
7. Save the font with a new name.

The only problem is finding suitable fonts with an OpenSource license that allow you to do this.

FontCreator Professional includes a glyph transformation wizard, which allows you to add Small Capital glyphs to any font that doesn't have them. It requires rather more work than just running the transform script, but its not particularly difficult.

Working with Glyph Transformations

[Dogmatix]

It is already possible by a simple use of copy paste.

1. Open the font with the Small Capital Glyphs
2. Select and copy them to the clipboard (assuming they're already in A-Z order)
3. Select the lowercase glyphs
4. Paste (glyph contours and metrics are copied by default) overwriting the existing glyphs
5. Delete the now redundant Small Caps glyphs
6. Run the Autonaming wizard
7. Save the font with a new name.

Thanks - that works a treat!

FontCreator Professional includes a glyph transformation wizard, which allows you to add Small Capital glyphs to any font that doesn't have them. It requires rather more work than just running the transform script, but its not particularly difficult.

Ah, now, that's what I call 'cheating' - it creates small caps by shrinking upper case letters, and it simply doesn't look anywhere near as good as true small caps.

There are lots of interesting glyphs and glyph variants in modern OpenType fonts, but few word processors can get at them, and even they cannot use the true small caps in these fonts. In fact, as far as I can see, there is, at present, not a single word processor for Windows which can use OpenType small caps. Not one. (Unless someone here knows better?) Yes, some publishing and typesetting programmes can - but they are not word processors. And most of them are hideously expensive (the exception being Serif PagePlus X5).

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Ah, now, that's what I call 'cheating' - it creates small caps by shrinking upper case letters, and it simply doesn't look anywhere near as good as true small caps.

It really doesn't do just that. Read the tutorial that I linked to.

It scales the glyphs horizontally and vertically by different amounts if you wish, and increases the horizontal and vertical stroke widths independently to compensate for the scaling. However, the user will have to make some adjustments to serifs and thin strokes as the transformer is not clever enough to increase stroke weights by a percentage — it just adds so many pixels horizontally and vertically.

Since Serif PagePlus X5 is so inexpensive, I don't see what the problem is. Just use that if you want good control over typography. Do your word-processing in Word etc., if you must, but do your printing and PDF production in PagePlus (or indeed DrawPlus).

The OpenType Small Capital glyphs added in FontCreator can be used in any modern word-processor by using the Insert Character feature, since they are all mapped to the Private Use Area. However, that is not terrible practical, even with the help of macros, which is what I used to do for ligatures years ago before PagePlus supported OpenType.