It would be great to have ‘small caps’ as typographical option for text!
Thanks.
Yes, I agree. Hopefully in the future we will be able to support the proper small caps feature in compatible OpenType fonts.
I’d like this as well for both text and lyrics. Occasionally I have hymns which use the word LORD in small caps in the lyrics (capital L, small caps ORD). I don’t think this is possible with Dorico today.
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As a publisher of liturgical music I need this capability for settings using certain translations of the psalms. For example, musical settings of the Revised Grail translation, administered by GIA Inc., requires LORD (capital L, small caps ORD) in order to be approved for publication. Is there any kind of workaround available today in Dorico?
If you’re talking about OpenType small caps, definitely! Also would love to see support for OpenType figure controls (lining vs old-style). Right now I use a hacked up OpenType font where I force the default to lining figures (vs the original font’s default of old-style) to work around it.
OpenType features are now available in Dorico (currently 6.2.10) and very welcome they are too. Like Paul Mason, my work is primarily in the field of liturgical music and, as he says, we are often required to use small caps for certain instances of ‘Lord’. Today, and for the first time, I encountered this in a psalm response — “I will sing to the Lord, glorious his triumph.” — which I, and others, customarily set in italics. Neither Academico nor Splentino (my default font) contain italic small caps glyphs — few fonts do — so I have switched to Minion Pro for this project. Given that an admittedly small minority of us frequently have need of them, would it be possible to add the necessary glyphs to Academico and Splentino — if not the complete set then just ‘o’, ‘r’ and ‘d’?
Small caps in Splentino Regular, yes — but not in Splentino Italic (unless I am missing something).
Oops sorry, you’re right! I read your post too quickly.
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Splentino already has Non-lining (“Old Style”) figures, so you should be able to create a Paragraph Style for titles that uses the OpenType features.
Nepomuk doesn’t: it’s not really in keeping with the style of typeface. Similar designs like Monotype Modern, Old Standard, Century, Hercules, De Vinne, or even Bodoni don’t have non-lining figures in their repertoire.
Thanks for your help on this, Ben. Tell me what I am missing here:
Splentino > Case: all upper case > OpenType features: Small Capitals…
I get the small caps, but not the old style numbers.
::: Bill
Italic Small Caps was never part of the original Plantin design.
I dare say it would be possible to extrapolate a set from the existing material. But, like Joe Strummer, it would be ‘all strings or none’, as the design of one letter tends to affect another. I’m not going to release a version with just a few letters.
For the time being, if you really need it, you can edit the characters within a syllable using “Edit Single Lyric…”, where you could set some to be at a reduced size (which isn’t quite as good as specifically designed letters, I know).
Thank you. That solution would work for me. I suspect that whoever typeset the New Roman Lectionary cheated anyway and used a faked Italic version of whatever font they were using!
Thanks, Ben, for guiding this old-style geezer through old-style figures in Splentino.
::: Bill
“Non-lining geezer” is the judgment-free term.
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