[Fontinst] "Capital" glyphs in TS1 encoding

[Ralf Stubner]

Peter Dyballa wrote:

> /capitalgrave
[...]
> The documentation describes them as being "intended for use with 
> capital letters." I wonder what this actually means. Are they there to 
> meet the needs and impression of small capital letters, i.e. smallcaps, 
> or are they there to be put on the regular capital letters of the font? 
> If so then they're simply superfluous because the T1 and TS1 encodings 
> already have them:
> 
> /grave
[...]
> So they are smallcaps, aren't they?

No, they are not for small caps. And they are not superfluous. There are
good reasons to have differently shaped accents for upper- and lowercase
letters (and maybe even a third type for small caps). One reason is that
there often isn't much space above a uc letter. So things like grave or
acute can't be as steep. For more details have a look at Victor Gaultney
'Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces'
<URL:http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/research.html>.

cheerio
ralf

-- 
Ralf Stubner        *       mailto:ralf.stubner at physik.uni-erlangen.de
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