Separate small cap fonts?

[jrmiller82]

Any plans on adding true small caps to the font faces?

[frankrolf]

“True” Small Caps already a are feature of Roman weights.
Small Caps are not very important in Italics IMO, but I will use this issue to gauge interest.

FYI: You made the same request before (#24), and the same answer was given.

[jrmiller82]

My apologies; I guess, my question is how to use them in Libreoffice of Word then?

[frankrolf]

That I don’t know. I found the following:
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/97858/small-caps-how-to-do-it/

[jrmiller82]

Let me rephrase, can we get the small caps separated out as separate fonts instead of combined in the existing ones?

[jrmiller82]

Anyone know how to separate out the small caps?

[miguelsousa]

Let me rephrase, can we get the small caps separated out as separate fonts instead of combined in the existing ones?

No, sorry. Making such fonts requires a significant amount of work and time that we'd rather invest elsewhere.

[moyogo]

@jrmiller82
One can use pyftfeatfreeze to generate a font with the small caps glyphs as the default by “freezing” the OpenType small cap feature.

[PeterBocan]

@miguelsousa so, what's the focus now?

[miguelsousa]

@PeterBocan read Frank's blog post. There's a lot of other stuff he's working on.

[samboy]

For people using word processors and what not which do not easily support OpenType small caps, I have made a TrueType version of a subset of Source Serif Pro Roman where lower case letters are small caps: https://github.com/samboy/NotAtAllOfficialFont

Only English and Spanish are supported in this font, and it’s missing things like the Euro symbol (this was a quick and dirty conversion)

[samboy]

I have added small caps bold to https://github.com/samboy/NotAtAllOfficialFont

[kenmcd]

LibreOffice has supported OpenType features since v5.3.
To display small caps you simply add ":smcp" to the font name when applied.
So it looks like this: Source Serif Pro:smcp
Just tested this and it is working fine with this font.
The lower text as written is the same as the upper text, but the lower text has the small caps applied.
See attached screenshot.

[jrmiller82]

Those are the true small caps? And those aren't just ticking the "small caps" box generated font from the word processor? https://practicaltypography.com/small-caps.html

[kenmcd]

Yes. This only works if the font has real small caps characters available and the OpenType feature is enabled in the font file.
Both of these are true with this font. I checked it.
This is not like the fake small caps button.
You can test for yourself by applying both methods to the sample text.
The real small caps will look better (correct stroke widths) than the fakes.

[samboy]

My own testing, using the SCTest font I just added to https://github.com/samboy/NotAtAllOfficialFont shows that:

• Microsoft Word uses fake small caps with this font
• SCTest:smcp is using real small caps in Libre office.

[jrmiller82]

Thank you.

[kenmcd]

Note that if you add ":smcp" to a font that does not have the OpenType small caps feature available - nothing happens.
There is no faking possible with this method.

[jigillespie]

One can use pyftfeatfreeze to generate a font with the small caps glyphs as the default by “freezing” the OpenType small cap feature.

Thank you for the suggestion! It's a fantastic tool for making a dedicated small caps font for programs that don't correctly implement Opentype features. I had a little trouble with the current version using Python 3, but running the previous 2015 version in Python 2 worked perfectly.

@jrmiller82 I'm pretty green when it comes to Python, but the process was pretty straightforward. The process is to

1. Download fonttools and the pyftfeatfreeze script
2. Install Python 2.7 (or use another tool to convert the old version to Python 3)
3. Navigate to where you downloaded the fonttools library, and execute "setup.py install" to install the library.
4. Go to where you kept the script and the font file and then follow the directions in the readme. For example, to convert SourceSerifPro-Regular.otf to a dedicated small caps font, use the following command.
   pyftfeatfreeze.py -f smcp -S -U Caps -R "Source Serif Pro/Smart Serif Pro,SourceSerifPro/SmartSerifPro" SourceSerifPro-Regular.otf SourceSerifPro-Regular-Caps.otf
   This will add the Suffix "Caps" to the name, replace "Source Serif Pro" with "Smart Serif Pro," and replace "SourceSerifPro" with "SmartSerifPro." Please note, this is just an example of how the tool works, and I'm not an expert on font licenses or trademark law, so please make sure this usage does not run afoul of any of the license terms or trademarks.
5. Install the fonts on your system and use as needed in Word, Acrobat, etc.

I hope this helps! And thank you to @frankrolf for your work. It is simply beautiful, and I would love to see more of it in the legal world.