Space Width for x-height Petite Capitals

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ClintGoss
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Space Width for x-height Petite Capitals

Post by ClintGoss »

Interesting that it appears from Bhikkhu's sample of Small / Petite caps that he is including $0020 in the set of alt caps ... is that true?

I have started doing that in my fonts (on the grounds that the standard-width space looks completely odd between petite caps), but was really unsure about whether that is a good idea -- never seen it done before.

Topic split from Caliver Book
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Caliver Book

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

ClintGoss wrote: Tue Jun 09, 2020 5:36 am Interesting that it appears from Bhikkhu's sample of Small / Petite caps that he is including $0020 in the set of alt caps ... is that true?
From where did you get that idea? I have included a smaller space for superscripts in some of my fonts before, but never for small or petite capitals. I see no need for it.

The blue vertical lines are for comparing the width of text runs of abcde for lowercase, small caps, and petite caps. The idea is that using Petite Capitals for a few words in a paragraph won't have much effect on text flow. Some fonts attempt to do that for the bold type style.

Image

These are the superscripts from Garava Italic, using the narrow space character. I dropped the idea as it makes unnecessary work. Whole words are rarely superscripted.
Supercript Space Character.png
Supercript Space Character.png (7.49 KiB) Viewed 16721 times
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ClintGoss
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Re: Space Width for x-height Petite Capitals

Post by ClintGoss »

Right. Thanks for the clarification.

In my own work, I do have times when I have sentences in Alt caps, which is why I include an alt space. I guess in the end we build our fonts the way we ourselves would use them ...
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