Small caps and .c2sc, .sc best practices

1

I’m currently using the c2sc and smcp variants for small caps in my font, but I’m wondering if this approach has become somewhat outdated and if there’s a better practice nowadays.

for example, I use the following names for small caps : A.c2sc and a.smcp. But Recently I see this : A.sc and a.sc

2

Just use a.sc. Glyphs will generate the c2sc code accordingly:

sub A by a.sc
...
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3

Thanks Sebastian. Do i need to leave A.c2sc names or also rename it as A.sc ?

4

They generally look the same, so you do not need separate A.s2sc glyphs.

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5

Thanks Florian.

6

Florian,
Although this is much more practical, does third-party software (such as Acrobat, Apercu, etc.) really understand the changes in unicodes that occur when using .smcp or .c2sc or .sc?

7

Font features happen after Unicode handling, so this is not an issue.[1]

If you really wanted to, you could use feature code to change the A glyph to a X glyph and the B to a Y, displaying AB as XY, but when the user selects and copies the text, it will still be AB, even when displayed as XY.

  1. Well, Adobe Acrobat can use the glyph names to reconstruct the original Unicode text from a purely glyph-based PDF file missing the original Unicode text. But I consider that an edge case that few people care about. ↩︎

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8

There is a tiny chance that it matters: If you export a .ps file and make a PDF with Distiller. Because the .ps file only contains the glyph names. If you copy paste from that, you would get the lower case, instead of the original uppercase. But I don’t think it is worth of having all those extra glyphs just because of it.

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9

There is a good reason to sometimes use .c2sc as suffix. It will add the substitution to c2sc only (and not to smcp). Makes sense in parentheses and punctuation that should switch with the caps and not in situations where only the lowercase is replaced with small caps. E.g. question.c2sc etc.