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• • August 19, 2011 at 4:37 am #60332
    Olaf Nelson

    Member

    I have an ongoing project in which I must use a particular font which does not have small caps AND I must use small caps for certain elements of the layout. I can't change the design as it's been set for many years.

    Sometimes the small caps are regular, sometimes bold, sometimes italic.

    The slow way to handle it is to figure out, for each different size of type and for regular, bold and italic, what percentage shorter and wider to make the letters so they work as small caps when the first letter of a word is capitalized. Then select all the letters except the first one and apply the fake small cap character style. But that's a pain.

    I'm wondering if it would be possible to script it so that when I click the small caps button in the control panel and the font in use does not have small caps, I'm asked what size (in points) to make the small caps and how much to widen them. I would still have to experiment to find out what looks right, but it would save a lot of word-by-word selecting and altering.

    For example: a subheading that's 10 pt bold small caps might need the lower case small caps to be 12 pt with a horizontal scale of 108%. Another place a 12 pt italic heading might need the lower case small caps to be 13 pt with a 98% vertical scale and 110% horizontal scale. (These are just semi-remembered facsimiles of what I really have had to do.)

    If it could remember what the choices were for a given size and style, that would be even better.

    Oh–one other complication for this project: it has to be done in CS3 so I can't experiment with GREP styles or other modern magic to make this happen.

    I know next to nothing about scripting, so I'm not really sure how to determine if something like this is possible.

    Thanks,

    Olaf

  • August 20, 2011 at 11:52 pm #60340
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Have a look at Sandee Cohen's post here https://creativepro.com/wha…..n-text.php

    Rather inventive way of making fake small caps that scale with the text they form part of. This may perhaps help you with your problem.

  • August 22, 2011 at 8:03 am #60354
    Olaf Nelson

    Member

    Thanks for that link. The percentage trick would be a good way of adjusting once I've got the right ratio of font sizes dialed in, but my initial thought is that it won't work for setting the faked small caps because it would make the strokes of the lower case small caps characters thinner than the initial capital letter in the word, and that's precisely the problem with applying small caps to fonts that don't have them built in.

    I'm also hoping to find a way to do this via a script or something greppy (though this is CS3) that recognizes whether the first letter of a word (or any letter in a word, I suppose) is capitalized and applies the style to the rest of the letters but not the capital, and knows to apply the style to all the letters in any word that has no capital.

    The reason I asked this in this forum is that I would love it if it could happen without me having to select any text at all in order to manually apply anything. I'd like to find a way to have it happen automatically when I click (or apply via a style) small caps for a font that does not have its own small caps.

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