When working with small caps in Glyphs should I create them as X.sc or x.sc? Does it matter?
This is a very controversial matter. It depends that you use the small caps for. If it is mainly for abbreviations, then the syntactical meaning of the text is uppercase. If you use it as a typographic style in text e.g. to mark names or something, it represents lowercase.
Personally I prefer lowercase small caps.
Glyphs will accept both.
Glyphs will accept both.
This should probably be added to “Glyph naming scheme for automatic feature generation” in the help file and the manual.
If you have exactly one set of SCs in your font, make it x.sc because some characters only exist as lowercase, like long ſ or icelandic kra, german ß etc. So your naming will be more consistent if you stick to lowercase.
Should you, however, choose to have two set of SCs in your font, make it X.c2sc and x.smcp. You can find scripts in my Github that will help you with that.
Can You explain why? Because of characters like longs, german dbl s?
Some type engines ignore the Unicode information and reconstruct the character from the glyph name. Distiller does that, and OS X prior to 10.5 does that. What they will do is strip everything after the dot and reinterpret the character based on what's left of the glyph name. Under these circumstances, X.c2sc will decode to an uppercase X, x.smcp to a lowercase x, no matter what the original character was before the small cap feature was applied. This can become an issue when you copy text from a PDF.
It shouldn’t be a problem with more modern software, though, so you probably don’t really need to bother anymore. But I haven’t done any thorough cross-platform testing either.
ok. got it. thanks.