Offtopic: Question for Minion Pro users

Dorico
1

Hello,
am I right that there is no dedicated small caps font for the Minion Pro font?

Has anyone tried to fake it?
I imagine it would look beautiful as title for a choral piece <3

Best regards
Stephan

2

there are 65 font weight variations, but there doesn’t appear to be a dedicated small caps variety.

3

The whole point of OpenType Pro fonts is that they contain features like Small Caps, ‘Old-Style’ numerals, and other variants within the character set of each font itself, rather than having separate font files for different variations. Then, the application selects what it wants.

However, Dorico can’t presently access the OpenType variants within a font.

If you can find the old Type 1 PostScript format, then this will have a separate Small Caps font.

You can of course fake it by using normal caps at a smaller size.

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4

I learn new things every day! (I’ve never really looked into font design, so I’m glad to know this.)

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5

If you use Affinity Publisher or Adobe InDesign, or other DTP app, then there are Typography panels where you can select Discretionary Ligatures, Lining styles, Swash Capitals, small caps, etc.
Even TextEdit has a panel where you can select the variants.

Screenshot
Screenshot260×661 33.2 KB

However, the Qt framework that Dorico uses for the interface doesn’t support OpenType styles.

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6

Yes-- I use small caps in AP on rare occasions (“Lord” in psalm settings, for instance) but I’d just never put 2+2 together that those characters were embedded in the font itself. It just worked so I never really thought about it before.

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7

Counterpoint: once you learn how to spot this fakery you’ll start seeing it everywhere and you’ll get irrationally angry at it every time.

(no? just me then?)

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8

No, please don’t. The font weight looks totally wrong when you do that!

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9

Thanks Benwiggy, didn’t know that about OpenType Pro Fonts. I’ll try that with Affinity Publisher!