I can find all the other small caps in the Glyph Info menu item, but not Small Cap Q. The others are Asmall, Bsmall for example, but not Qsmall. Why is this and where can I find it? FYI I’ve tried the unicode for Small Cap Q (U+A7AF) but that doesn’t seem to work either.
Small caps are not accessed using Unicode, so the small cap glyphs generally don’t need a Unicode code point. The names of the small caps glyphs are most commonly written as the name of the capital glyph plus .smcp or .sc: A.smcp, B.smcp, …
These small cap glyph names are not listed in the Glyph Info since this is a naming scheme that can be applied to any glyph.
The Unicode characters like U+1D00 or U+A7AF are used in more specialized settings, commonly for linguistic notation or as standalone letters in some languages. The glyphs look similar to or are derived from small caps, so you could share these glyphs for both those specialized letters and the small caps of your other letters. If your font is not designed for these settings, I would not added Unicode code points to your small cap glyphs.
Adding to what Florian said, one note: the small variants (indeed often used for phonetic transcription) are technically petite caps, so as high as the x-height. Small caps are generally a bit taller than that. So don’t use the same Unicode values unless you really know what you’re doing.
In any case, if you’re really talking about small caps, use the OpenType feature as Florian described.
Thanks Florian and Sebastian, but my question wasnt reall asking about Unicode. I can make the small capital letters by typing Asmall, Bsmall, Csmall etc but why not Qsmall? Is the Xsmall command in Font Info dialogue box not the correct way to go?
The point is that Asmall and the others are not really small caps. They look similar and in some designs you might get away with reusing them for small caps, but they have other uses.
For small caps, name your glyphs A.smcp and so on.
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Ah, I understand now. Thank you for explaining.
One more question following that… All the other letters have names which do not use a period in the glyph name (for example A, Acircumflex etc) but A.smcp does. Is this important? The font seems to work fine without periods in the glyph names.
You can think of glyph names without a dot as the standard glyphs and glyph names with a dot as alternative glyphs. You add a qualifier like .smcp to a standard glyph name to get an alternative glyph name.
See the Handbook for details:
There are two main reasons for the difference between the Xsmall and x.smcp naming schemes.
Automatic features
The dots are required for automatic feature generation to work.
If you name your small-caps glyphs a.smcp (or just a.sc) and so on, then open your Font Info > Features and add smcp and c2sc features with the “Generate feature automatically” ticked, Glyphs will automatically generate the feature code needed to make the font support small caps in applications that offer it.
If you name your small-caps glyphs Asmcp and so on and do the same, it won’t do anything, because the app is specifically looking for glyphs that have the .s(m)c(p) suffix, with the dot.
Semantics
There’s also a semantic difference between the two naming types.
A glyph made up of multiple individual parts – like Acircumflex, which is made up of A and circumflex – has those parts written out after each other as one word with no dots or underscores or anything. Glyphs that are based on another glyph but redefine some part of it use the same pattern: idotless is a lowercase i redefined to not include the dot (that is, ı), and oopen is a lowercase o redefined to be open on the left side (that is, ɔ). They are based on other glyphs, but they are their own, separate characters and shouldn’t be treated as equivalent to what they’re based on.
Asmall falls into this category: it’s an uppercase A redefined to be as tall as the font’s x-height, but it is not an uppercase A, and there is no context in which typing an uppercase A on your keyboard should ever produce ᴀ, just like typing a lowercase o on your keyboard should never produce ɔ.
That’s not really what things like small and petite caps, sub- and superscripts, proportional/tabular and lining/old-style figures, or initial/medial/final forms are. Rather, these are sets of alternate ways to present glyphs for various effects (some ornamental, some required). These glyphs are produced in your application by typing the ‘base’ character on your keyboard in a context where the feature in question applies; e.g., to produce the a.sc glyph, you would turn on the small-caps feature and type a regular a on your keyboard.
Note: Sebastian’s statement above that Asmall and similar are “technically petite caps” is not quite accurate. In most fonts that have petite caps, the petite-cap height is the same as the x-height, so Asmall and a.pc(ap) will likely look identical. But there’s no requirement for this to be the case, and some fonts do have petite caps that are either taller or shorter than the x-height, or indeed use a different-looking glyph for Asmall.
Really helpful Janus. Thanks!