John Jason Jordan wrote: > There are actually three ways to get small caps: > > 1) In any word processor you can apply a small caps attribute, the same > as italic, bold, etc. However, when the word processor applies italic > or bold it does so by choosing the italic of bold font for the typeface > you are using.
Not always, unfortunately. Word processors may also *create* fake bold or italic faces by applying mathematical transforms to the original face. They may do this if no bold/italic face is available or if they can't find the right face. As Andreas just said about fake small caps, "The result is typographically ugly." There's actually no technical reason to avoid fake bold and italics, by the way, *if* *you* *do* *it* *right*. Such fake faces should be converted to outlines on PDF output, so the RIP doesn't see them as text at all. However, they're still downright ugly, so it's not something I can see anybody wanting to implement. The reason "fake" bold and italics got such an awful rep is because of the braindead way that Quark (at least as of 4.0) italicises and bolds fonts. It just appends "Bold" or "Italic" to the font name when it exports to PostScript, but displays a faked preview on screen. If you don't *have* the Bold/Italic variant, or your italic variant has a different name (like Oblique) you then run into exciting PostScript errors in printing and/or Acrobat distiller. That's why designers tend to be nuts about picking the named bold/italic face directly, rather than using the DTP app's bold/italic buttons. I only really understood how this behaviour was completely distinct from and much stupider than normal fake faces. -- Craig Ringer
