Hello,
Will small caps ever be available with the Academico Regular font in Dorico? I love small caps and the Academico Regular font. If that’s never going to be possible, what’s the font most similar to Academico Regular that offers small caps via OpenType?
Thank you,
Greg
The results of a few quick internet searches seem to concur that Academico is based on New Century Schoolbook. If that is incorrect, please feel free to correct me - the internet does not always get things right, particularly when AI is involved.
This sould be possible with a Character style that applies the Small Caps OpenType feature, as @asherber describes here:
However, for some reason I can’t get this to work with Academico when I try this now, but that might be user error on my part.
The reason is that Academico doesn’t have small Cap characters.
TBH, Academico/NCS benefits from a bit of compression, as it’s quite wide.
You’re right that Academico is a New Century Schoolbook clone, as is Schola Tex Gyre; but STG is not very good, in my opinion.
There are many Century-type fonts out there, most of which are commercial; some of which have Small Caps. URW’s Century Old Style has dedicated Small Caps fonts:
Using a character style, make the style about 80% of normal. When you want to use it, wrap the “small” letters in the style but not the initial letter — and use caps for all.
(Example: S{@style:SmallCaps@}MALL{@/style@} C{@style:SmallCaps@}APS{@/style@} It’s a bit of a pain but copy and paste helps.
Indeed, and who remembers the ‘faux bold’ (Donald Knuth’s term) for the ‘stuttering bold’ electric typewriters could do (and which TeX has an inbuilt function to simulate IIRC).
Well, I didn’t say it was perfect! 
I would love to have a native well-tooled Small Caps with every font. In lieu of that, we either have to make do, use a font that has them, make our own, and/or complain about it.
No small caps in Amadeus ‘back in the day’;
B\s’80’UBB
was the command to scale 80%, IIRC.
Ooh, there are some typefaces that definitely shouldn’t be used as Small Caps. And it certainly doesn’t suit all Italic styles, either.
Well, true enough! Probably doesn’t make sense for Arabic, Kanji, or a number other languages as well!
Or the fun headache in Turkish, where Iı and İi are distinct letters in spite of Unicode.
