In the example below, I need a small-caps “M.” It exists in the font, and I’ve tried copying from Font Book and entering as Unicode, but in both cases, all I get is a miniscule.
I’ve tried various ways to get around this, but the only solution I know is to make a small-caps variant of the font. However, due to the licensing restrictions, I’m certain this is not legal.
Is there any way to get a true, proper small-cap here? I literally just want to place the glyph in the spot… I don’t care at this point what sort of workaround it is.
Edit: no, I can’t just shrink a majuscule to a smaller point size. It’s… bad.
No, Unicode is an international standard. In this standard, unfortunately, there’s no special range reserved for the encoding of small caps. You could, theoretically, use one of the ‘Private’ ranges to add them to a font, but you wouldn’t have an easy way to type them, and they wouldn’t behave like other text when it comes to word selection, word wrapping, spell checking etc.
Small caps are typically a font feature, just like old-style figures, swashes, ligatures etc. An application has to support these features, otherwise you can’t access them.
Apparently, the Qt development framework, used for Dorico, doesn’t support some font features yet, although I read somewhere (probably on this forum) that more recent versions of Qt made some progress in this regard. What’s certain is that also the Dorico developers want to support more of these font features inside Dorico, when they become available. It’ll be a matter of time (and development priorities).
ok, right, that was my thinking to use a private area. Admittedly I am still learning about unicodes and font creation, it’s very complex, especially if there is not much support for it at the user input end.
Thank you for your reply, very informative
Thanks all. In this case I just ended up making a version of the typeface that replaced all the majuscules with small caps, and then switched the typeface for that letter in Edit Single Lyric. Not what I prefer, but it was the only solution I could find.
