Bug 16771

Summary:	Add OpenType Small Capital Letters
Product:	DejaVu	Reporter:	Sven Siegmund <sven.siegmund>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Deja Vu bugs <dejavu-bugs>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium	CC:	cmertes, samjnaa
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Sven Siegmund 2008-07-18 02:16:56 UTC

Hello, 

I know that there may be issues with higher priorities for the DejaVu fonts, but please consider adding small capital letters (small caps). 

Small caps are typographically useful especially for linguists. They have a typographical tradition of writing particular meanings in interlinearized texts in small capital letters.

For now it would suffice to have just the plain face in small caps, later one could add italic small caps, bold small caps, and bold italic small caps. This would tremendously improve the typographical value of DejaVu fonts since only very few OpenType fonts have all these small caps. DejaVu would then be an option also for typesetters who don't necessarily need DejaVu's marvellous character inventory.

Comment 1 James Cloos 2008-07-18 09:40:19 UTC

Steps to do this:

• Open the font in fontforge
• Select the majuscules of interest
• Element/Style/Add Small Capitals...
• Decide on the scaling factors in that dialog

and that will generate proper (albeit unhinted) small caps with .sc names.

The cpsc and similar otf features may need to be added manually.

I’m not certain of the best scaling factors for DejaVu, it may require some experimentation to get optimal results. . . .

Comment 2 Ben Laenen 2008-07-21 12:08:58 UTC

If it's that easy, then there's nothing to stop you from making a patch :-)

While I haven't tested it, I guess the result would still need a lot of cleaning up so I don't think it's entirely straight forward to do.

Pierre-Luc Auclair was working on smallcaps for serif. He currently doesn't have time to finish it, but I've asked them to send it to the mailing list to see where we can get from what he has done so far.

Comment 3 James Cloos 2008-07-21 13:43:14 UTC

> If it's that easy, then there's nothing to stop you from making a patch :-)

Actually, I am working on some python code to do it for all faces in one
fell swoop.  Much easier than plodding through GUI.

I got distracted by an (unrelated) Xlib bug, but I have a good idea of
what the code needs to look like, so it shouldn't take too long to type
in and test....  [He says optimisticly.]

Comment 4 Denis Jacquerye 2008-07-28 08:26:57 UTC

It would be nice to have all extended characters with smallcaps too, not just the basic ones.

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