Small caps generator

Small caps are capital letterforms drawn at roughly the height of a lowercase x. Typographers have used them for centuries for things that should not shout: acronyms inside running text, the first line of a chapter, stage directions, the name of a speaker. They read as understated and slightly editorial, which is exactly why they work so well in a bio where every other option looks like it is trying too hard.

The Unicode characters that produce this effect were not encoded for typography, and that explains their oddities. They come mostly from the International Phonetic Alphabet and from Phonetic Extensions, where a small capital letter is not a stylistic variant but a distinct sound: small capital I is the vowel in "bit", small capital R is a uvular trill, small capital N is a velar nasal. Unicode encodes characters by meaning, so a small capital that means a specific phoneme gets a code point, while a small capital that merely means "the letter A, set smaller" does not. The set we can borrow from is therefore whatever the phoneticians happened to need.

Two letters are missing as a result. There is no small capital Q anywhere in Unicode, so FontVibe substitutes ǫ, an o with an ogonek, which is the closest widely-supported shape and reads correctly in context. There is also no small capital X, so a plain lowercase x stands in, which works better than you would expect because x has almost the same shape at both cases. Everything else in the alphabet is genuine.

It is worth knowing what real small caps are, because it changes what you should use where. In proper typography, small caps are an OpenType feature: the font contains a second set of capital glyphs designed at small size with thickened strokes and widened spacing so they do not look like shrunken capitals, and the software swaps them in when you ask for the smcp feature. That is what a designer means by small caps. Unicode small caps are a workaround for places where you have no access to font features at all, which is to say most text fields on the internet.

Compared with the other options here, small caps have the best legibility-to-distinctiveness ratio. Superscript letters are smaller but blur at real sizes. Fullwidth is distinctive but enormous. Script is decorative but has eight patched capitals. Small caps sit on the baseline, keep even weight, and are covered by almost every system font, so the odds of a reader seeing an empty box are low. The one thing to accept is that you lose capitalisation entirely: since uppercase and lowercase both map to the same small capital, a name and a common noun look identical.

Common questions

Why does my Q look like an o with a tail?

Because there is no small capital Q in Unicode. It was never needed for phonetic notation, so it was never encoded. The ogonek o is the standard substitute and it is close enough that most readers never notice. The alternative is an empty box or an out-of-place full-size Q.

Why is the x not a small capital?

Same reason, no small capital X exists. Fortunately lowercase x is nearly identical in shape to a capital X at small size, so the plain letter blends in almost perfectly.

Can I mix small caps with normal capitals?

Yes, and it often looks best that way. Type the first letter of a name as a normal capital and run the rest through the generator, which gives you the classic typographic effect of a full capital followed by small caps.

Are small caps better supported than other styles?

Generally yes. Because they are phonetic characters rather than mathematical ones, they appear in the font coverage that systems ship for IPA, which is widespread. You are less likely to see boxes than with the mathematical alphabets.

See also

• Small text generator
• Italic text generator
• Vaporwave and aesthetic text generator