Faux Small Caps

[anipaq]

While Tufte did use small capitals to start a section in his later books, HTML/CSS does not support true small capitals. As Matthew Butterick notes in the “Small Caps” chapter of Practical Typography: “don’t use the CSS prop­erty font-vari­ant: small-caps. Ever. These op­tions do not pro­duce small caps. They pro­duce in­fe­rior counterfeits.”

I believe the use of these faux small caps in the newthought class violates the spirit of Tufte’s typographic style.

[daveliepmann]

What do you suggest instead?

On Saturday, 17 September 2016, anipaq notifications@github.com wrote:

While Tufte did use small capitals to start a section in his later books,
HTML/CSS does not support true small capitals. As Matthew Butterick notes
in the “Small Caps” http://practicaltypography.com/small-caps.html
chapter of Practical Typography: “don’t use the CSS prop­erty font-vari­ant:
small-caps. Ever. These op­tions do not pro­duce small caps. They
pro­duce in­fe­rior counterfeits.”

I believe the use of these faux small caps in the newthought class
violates the spirit of Tufte’s typographic style.

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[anipaq]

Some typefaces, such as EB Garamond and Alegreya, have their true small capitals as separate font files that can be used in a situation like that. Long term I would suggest adding separate small caps font file to the ET Book typeface.

Until that point I would recommend eliminating the newthought class altogether because without the small capitals there is not enough indication that a new section has started. There is no justification good enough for using faux small capitals because they disrupt the overall color of the text.

[daveliepmann]

A pull request to add a separate small caps font files to ET Book would, I expect, be welcome in that repo.

If the proposal here is to remove newthought functionality without a replacement, I think we'll pass. I empathize with the Butterick position that small-caps is poorly implemented in CSS, but the solution therefore is to not use newthought. For the moment I don't find it egregious enough to remove without replacement.

[adrientetar]

font-feature-settings: 'smcp';

or

font-variant-caps: small-caps;