Easily using small caps

You can try opening the font palette, selecting your font, clicking on the gear wheel at the lower left and opening the typography tab, and seeing if there are any selections for Letter Case.

I really don't understand why Apple installed a "small caps" menu item which calculate the characters.
It would have been cleaner to install such a menu inserting the TRUE small caps when the feature is available in the font in use and changing nothing when the feature is unavailable in the font.
Exactly the way it behaves with Bold and Italic.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 28 juillet 2008 20:48:59)

I really don't understand why Apple installed a "small caps" menu item which calculate the characters.

Is there no value at all in being able to produce these glyphs for those fonts which do not have them as a typographical feature?

I believe many ardent typographers would answer, "not much".

Readability is a semantic and syntac attribute of text while legibility is a visual attribute of type. The smaller the type size the heavier the stroke and the wider the set. The larger the type size the lighter the stroke and the narrower the set.

The introduction of photo-mechanical and photo-electronic composition made photographic scaling possible, and the introduction of splines perpetuated the possibility (URW Nimbus, Linotype's early no name splines, Adobe Type 1 and Type 3, Bitstream Speedo, Apple TrueType, Monotype Qubic, Compugraphic Intellifont).

The problem with splines is that the single master is designed for some size and that single master is then scaled to sizes it was not designed for. If the design is for 12 point and a 6 point small cap is faked from the 12 point capital, the 6 point will be illegibly light.

There are two technologies that deal with this, one is Adobe's Multiple Master technology and the other is Apple's Variations technology for up to 64 design dimensions simultaneously. Adobe's technology was made for simulating fonts Adobe did not have permission to embed in PDF.

Adobe's technology was sold in Adobe Type 1 Multiple Master type products, supported in QuarkXPress 3. Adobe's technology is used as internal format in Fontlab whereas the external format is saved out as single master. OpenType 1.4 does not support Multiple Masters.

Apple's Variations technology was developed for complex multilingual composition, for instance, in shaping of kashidas in Arabic. It is simplicity itself to use, simply use the sliders in the Typography Palette for SFNT Spline Font files that have Variations.

Note that the QuickDraw Graphics Extension and ATSUI Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging support as well Apple Variations as Adobe Multiple Masters. To test this, download Intaglio from Purgatory Design and enable the Typography Palette for Apple Skia and any Adobe Type 1 Multiple Master of your choice.

Henrik

Reference:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5185818.html

Hi Tom

I just try to define a coherent behavior.

Apple don't calculate Bold,
don't calculate Italic
Why are they calculating small caps?

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 29 juillet 2008 11:36:40)

Apple don't calculate Bold, don't calculate Italic. Why are they calculating small caps?

People accustomed to DTP are accustomed to faux small caps, faux superiors, and faux inferiors supported in PageMaker and QuarkXPress from the earliest versions.

Faux cursive is impossible, it is a different master than the master for antiqua. Oblique grotesque (Eng. sans serif) is possible as is bold grotesque, supported since Helvetica Narrow in August 1985.

Faux small capitals from capitals stay searchable in PDF, true small capitals do not stay searchable as they are drawn by depiction onto other glyph codes and not by depiction onto character codes.

hh

As far as I know, they where also accustomed to Bold and Italics.

Apple take care of the intellectual property for Bold and Italic but it doesn't for other "faux". From my point of view, it's pure nonsense.

A sin is a sin, a thief is a thief. I don't know half sin or half thief.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 29 juillet 2008 14:10:50)

A sin is a sin, a thief is a thief. I don't know half sin or half thief.

An antiqua and cursive type face is an intellectual effort of two or three years. There is no protection for the type maker, a small independent software publisher.

Type today is a pawn in a commercial conflict that has to do with control of the document model (PostScript, then PDF, then XPS) and increasingly with control of the advertising model.

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! search totalled half the state budget of Denmark and it turns on the minor mathematical matter of mapping characters to glyphs - and glyphs back to characters.

There are times when I think we would be better off with Monotype and Linotype hot metal composition, no problem with faux fonts, no problem with glyphs that are drawn without direct depiction onto characters, no problem with separating content data from appearance data in output and then stitching the appearance data and the content data back together again for repurposing ... -:).

hh

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
An antiqua and cursive type face is an intellectual effort of two or three years. There is no protection for the type maker, a small independent software publisher.

Here in France, a font is treated as a program so the Intellectual property apply.
Isn't it the same in the USA ?

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 29 juillet 2008 19:43:23)

Here in France, a font is treated as a program so the Intellectual property apply. Isn't it the same in the USA ?

The program can be protected under the law, the design cannot be protected under the law, if memory serves. But to install a software product for authoring, you have to have the licence number and in some cases you have to have a dongle. Not so to install type.

From the point of view of the printing industry, the type war that started in 1989 was about plentiful and fee fonts for laser imaging. This first and foremost meant Adobe Type 1 font program dictionaries that cannot be protected from embedding by definition.

An SFNT-housed font can be protected from embedding by the fstype tag in the OS/2 table, a function that has to be set in the type drawing software e.g. Fontlab. Microsoft initiated editable embedding in Microsoft Word, making Word a softcopy solution.

But there is no protecting of type with a licence key, not Latin type at least. Kanji is different. Latin type is too important to be permitted proper protection which, paradoxically, is also why there is so much broken type that cannot be mended because there is no normal procedure for mending it.

hh

A font is a design and the code to reach the wanted goal.
So here, a font IS a program and is protected as other programs.
The design of a Tshirt is protected (see Lacoste) as well as the design of a Font.
The fact that the Latin font designed by Mr. Thisorthat is protected doesn't make us unable to use an other Latin font. I don't know if it's the same with eastern fonts.
A "Garamond" designed by Aaa is different than a "Garamond" designed by Bbbb.
The Helvetica font has an author as well as the "LeMonde" one.

When Apple distributes some fonts with its operating system, they are distributed with some authorizations.
As I already wrote, with MacOS X, we are not allowed, with the tools delivered by Apple, to use calculated Italics or calculated Bold. I think that it's a very good thing. I'm just surprised by what I see as an incoherence: we have the ability to calculate superscripts, subscripts and small caps. I think that it's odd. Calculating these "faux" is no less no more destructing the original design than the two others.

And, the fact that Word allow users to calculate all the "faux" is certainly not a reason to do the same.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 29 juillet 2008 21:24:48)

Branden Wiegand wrote:

Tom Gewecke wrote:

I really don't understand why Apple installed a "small caps" menu item which calculate the characters.

Is there no value at all in being able to produce these glyphs for those fonts which do not have them as a typographical feature?

I believe many ardent typographers would answer, "not much".

I doubt many ardent typographers use Pages for their ardent typography.

I doubt many ardent typographers use Pages for their ardent typography.

Jeff Raskin who was Apple's first technical writer based the Macintosh project on the premise that the difference between calculators and computers is that the latter do text and type, the former do not.

The premise used by the TrueType team in developing smart typographic shaping and smart typographic scaling was that it should be for applications that do not their own complex layout architectures.

The premise of the Unicode team today is the same, "As I say, Word on Windows is fine for almost everything in Unicode, and Pages on Mac OS X is fine for all of it. It is resolved now in that sense."

In a bare bones utility like TextEdit you can input Shakespeare as ASCII / ISO 646 content data and output Shakespeare as a simulation in appearance data.

As of Copland, the premise has been that each SFNT Spline Font file defines its own rendering, giving the type maker the freedom to do as much or as little as she thinks fit.

Invertibility is missing. Speed is missing (CoreText is twice as fast as ATSUI for long and heavily formatted documents). And interactivity is missing.

It's not completely broken and it's not completely polished. It's betwixt and between, with the basics in place, and with ample room for improvement.

References:

http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2008-m02/0050.html