[XeTeX] small caps in Apple Pages vs XeLaTeX

[Berteun Damman]

On Nov 17, 2007 5:50 PM, Faisal Moledina <faisal.moledina at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm getting back into TeX after a number of months hiatus. I'm stuck
> on something quite elementary. Why is it that I can chose small caps
> in Apple Pages for a font like Georgia and can't select for
> Letters=SmallCaps in fontspec? If I run the AAT-info.tex for Georgia,
> I get that there are no features. Why is it that it works in Pages
> then?

My guess is Pages is faking them. It will convert your text to all
caps and shrink these by, say, 70%. This however results in letters
that are too thin. If you look closely, the stem of the small caps I
will probably thinner than an i. Small caps are usually separately
designed to match to the surrounding text.

With some fonts resizing the bold version yields something more
acceptable, though usually the step from normal to bold is too large.
You need a semi-bold, or more weights in between.

You can experiment with this. You can pass a SmallCaps=Georgia and
SmallCapsFeatures=Scale=0.72 to the Georgia instance; if you type
\textsc{HTML} (notice you have to use caps in this case) to get fake
small caps with XeTeX.

Berteun