Better Small Caps

Fri, Apr 18, 2008

Tip

The default “small caps” proportions in QuarkXPress are ugly — they’re too small, and the small caps appear thinner than the tall caps.

Better Small Caps

One solution is to make the small caps slightly wider than the tall caps. This makes them slightly thicker, to more closely match the weight of the tall caps.

To do this in any version of QuarkXPress, change the Small Caps preference from its default width and height 75% to 85% high and 90% wide in QuarkXPress> Preferences> Print Layout> Character.

Better Small Caps

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This post was written by:

- who has written 1196 posts on Planet Quark.

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.

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4 Responses to “Better Small Caps”

  1. Fritz Says:
    18. April 2008 at 10:12 am

    An even better method is to use an opentype font with small caps support. This will use glyphs that are the correct size and your type look even.

  2. Jay Nelson Says:
    18. April 2008 at 10:23 am

    Absolutely! But many of the fonts I use don’t have true small caps. So what’s a guy to do? This solution makes them look far better than the default settings.

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