Small Caps

A place for users to ask each other questions, make suggestions, and discuss Bookends.
hareiko
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Small Caps

Post by hareiko »

Suggestion: I want to use small caps for Authors in my format. Bookends does offer all Caps, small Caps and normal case in the format editor, but small caps is not really small caps it all caps in a smaller font size. My understanding of small caps is a format with normal sized capital letters as first letter in capitalized words and smaller caps for the rest, if you know what I mean
Jon
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Post by Jon »

Hi, yes I do. You'll find it works the way you want in the next Bookends update (regular cap for first letter, small caps (-4 points) in the remainder).

Jon
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hareiko
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Post by hareiko »

Wonderful, then when can we expect the next update?
Thanks Hareiko
Jon
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Post by Jon »

Sorry, I can't say for sure, and I don't want to guess and then be wrong. But I expect the timing will be in line with the frequency of our previous updates.

Jon
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joewiz
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Post by joewiz »

Jon - I don't want to slow down the development of this feature, but I do want to ask if you can integrate small caps with Mellel on Mellel's terms. Mellel doesn't have a 'fake' small caps feature (10 pt for big caps, 6 pt for small), but does allow you to use Opentype fonts that support small caps. In other words, can you make sure that your small caps style makes it into Mellel as a character style?
Jon
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Post by Jon »

Hi Joe,

In a word, no. Bookends sends the data back as RTF. How Mellel deals with it is up to it, not Bookends.

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joewiz
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Post by joewiz »

Jon wrote:Bookends sends the data back as RTF.
Thanks, Jon. I notice that RTF has a small caps function (from <http://www.biblioscape.com/rtf15_spec.htm>):

Code: Select all

\msmcap	Small caps
\pnscaps	Small Caps numbering
I wonder if it would help to pass RTF tags like this off to Mellel rather than multi-sized text? (Just an idea.)
Jon
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Post by Jon »

I wonder if Mellel honors this?

Jon
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joewiz
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Post by joewiz »

Jon wrote:I wonder if Mellel honors this?
I don't know (the Redlers could tell you for sure), but there was recently a discussion about small caps on the Mellel forums http://forum.redlers.com/viewtopic.php?t=92:
Mellel only uses Small Caps if the font (should be an OpenType) has the glyphs for Small Caps built in. The normal Times and Times New Roman fonts don't have small caps built in, so you couldn't see them.
Other WordProcessors also could generate Small Caps by using scaled down capital letters (fake or faux caps - because no real glyphs are used) but Mellel don't do this, because it doesn't look very good.
If you need a Times with small caps, you could buy one here (for example). If you buy a new font, make sure, it's a OpenType one.
http://www.linotype.com/1537/times-family.html
So, Small Caps is supported, and my guess is that since the Redlers use their own RTF import engine, they could implement a translation from RTF's small caps code into Mellel's opentype style support (if it isn't already).
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Post by Jon »

Perhaps. Let's table this discussion for now. The solution we will offer works with all word processors, all fonts, and looks good (especially considering we're dealing with a bibliography here).

Jon
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joewiz
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Post by joewiz »

Jon wrote:Perhaps. Let's table this discussion for now. The solution we will offer works with all word processors, all fonts, and looks good (especially considering we're dealing with a bibliography here).
Sure - this isn't even a feature that I'm asking for. It simply occurred to me that it could be implemented more seamlessly for Bookends-Mellel users than the proposed solution would work.
gnoli
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Post by gnoli »

The problem arose with diacritics (e. g. transliterations from Arabic). In this case would be necessary that Bookends is OpenType compliant for a complete integration with OpenType fonts (e.g. from Linguist's Software)
matthias
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Post by matthias »

As a workaround for Small Caps in Mellel I can think of a search and replace action in Mellel. Once Jon will have the distinction between caps and small caps implemented you could search for all letters sized 7 points (or what ever will be the size Bookends will be scaling down to) and then replace all those with the same letters using a Mellel letter style that uses open type small caps.
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Post by Jon »

Hi,

To be clear, Bookends does have small caps. But it uses actual font sizes, not OpenType font substitution. So this solution may work in some situations now.

Jon
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julesmim
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Re: Small Caps

Post by julesmim »

Hello,

As soon as I saw "Improved small cap handling in Word and Nisus Writer Pro citations" in the Update history for version 12.0.6 of Bookends, I checked whether Bookends finally implement Small Caps in MS Word as, in my opinion, it should do.

I find bad formatting having 2 different font sizes in the same word (one size for first letter, and another size for the other letters. And that is what happens when Bookends apply its format "Small Caps".

Microsoft Word has a font style called "Small Caps". When you apply it to a word, all the letters of this word remained coded with the same font size, but Word changes the appearance of all the small letters to small caps, keeping the capital(s) as they are.

So I can search for all text with the font style "Small Caps" and find it appropriately.
The way Bookends apply its pseudo-small caps, I should find all text with a different font size, and will find not whole words, but words truncated from their first letter.
And it might be that other text has this same font size not applied by Bookends, but by myself for other reasons.

With the "improvement" brought by BE 12.0.6 (namely "Bookends will output them not in absolute point numbers but in relation to the style sheet font size settings"), things are getting worse: to find all "small caps" I might have to search for different sizes, depending on the context in which it is.

Another problem would be if I want to use find and replace to change all text of a particular size to a different size, the change would be applied with the exclusion of the special size Bookends had set in place of small caps.

As it has been mention in one previous post in this thread, Microsoft RTF has a code for Small Caps. I also already mentioned this: rft tag "\scaps" (cf. Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification, version 1.6)

I use all the time small caps for the author names in my references. And they may be in different context with different sizes (main text, footnote, endnote, special bibliography after a chapter. I understand that things could be fixed manually for short texts, but I use mainly Bookends to allow uniformity of formatting in long texts (books).

I hope there will be a way to realize what would be for me a real improvement for small caps.

By the way, thanks for adding the option of having only surnames in small caps. With the proper way to get small caps, it would be perfect.
Thanks for listening.
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