Template:Smallcaps

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Template documentation

Template:Template shortcut Template:COinS safe {{Smallcaps}} will display the lowercase part of your text as a soft format of typographical small caps.
For example: {{smallcaps|Beware of Dog}} → Beware of Dog.

This template should be avoided or used sparingly in articles; small caps should be avoided and reduced to one of the other title cases or normal case and markup should be kept simple.

Usage

Your source text is not altered in the output, only the way it is displayed on the screen: a copy-paste of the text will give the small caps sections in their original form; similarly, an older or non-CSS browser will only display the original text on screen.

Code  

{{Smallcaps|Your Text in 4004 bc}}

Displayed

Your Text in 4004 bc

Pasted  

Your Text in 4004 bc

This template is therefore intended for the use of caps as a typographic style, such as rendering family names in bibliographies in small caps to distinguish them from given names. It should not be used for acronyms or abbreviations which are supposed to be capitalized regardless of style. For such cases, use {{Smallcaps all}}.

Notes

• Diacritics (å, ç, é, ğ, ı, ñ, ø, ş, ü, etc.) are handled. However, because the job is performed by each reader's browser, inconsistencies in CSS implementations can lead to some browsers not converting certain rare diacritics.
• Use of this template does not generate any automatic categorization. As with most templates, if the argument contains an = sign, the sign should be replaced with {{=}}, or the whole argument be prefixed with 1=. And for wikilinks, you need to use piping. There is a parsing problem with MediaWiki which causes unexpected behavior when a template with one style is used within a template with another style.
• There is a problem with dotted and dotless I in Turkish names.
• Do not use this inside citation templates, or this template's markup will be included in the COinS metadata. This means that reference management software such as Zotero will store the markup. For example, if {{smallcaps}} is used to format the surname of Bloggs, Joe in {{cite journal}}, then Zotero will store the name as <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Bloggs</span>, Joe. This is incorrect COinS metadata.

Reasons to use small caps

Small caps are useful for encyclopedical and typographical uses including:

To lighten ALL-CAPS surnames mandated by citation styles such as Harvard

• Piccadilly has been compared to "a Parisian boulevard" (Dickens 1879).
• Dickens, C., Jr (1879). "Piccadilly" in Dickens's Dictionary of London. London: C. Dickens.[1]

To disambiguate Western names and surnames at a glance

• Many foreign names are tricky to decompose:
  • Jorge Luis Borges, but Adolfo Bioy (both filed under "B")
• Many names (such as Martin) can be either forename or surname:
  • John Martin Smith]] as against John Martin

To disambiguate Eastern surnames and given names at a glance

• Most Chinese names retain their surname-first order:
  • Mao Tse Tung

Technical

Technically, the template merely wraps the standard:

<span style="font-variant:small-caps;"> ... </span>

(The "font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase" has not been used because it does not work at least in Internet Explorer 5 and 6, which are still fairly common browsers.)

Suppressing small caps

If you wish to suppress the display of small caps in your browser, as a logged in user, you can make an edit to your common.css reading

span.smallcaps { font-variant: normal !important; }

See also

Templates that change the display (copy-paste will get the original text):

• {{Allcaps}} – upper-case display
• {{Nocaps}} – lower-case display
• {{Smallcaps}} – small-caps display
• {{Smallcaps all}} – hard-formatted small-caps display
• {{Fixcaps}} – capitalizes words {{fixcaps|pLAy/tHE/GamE}} → Template:Fixcaps

Magic words that rewrite the output (copy-paste will get the text as displayed):

• {{lc:}} – lower case output of the full text
• {{uc:}} – upper case output of the full text
• {{lcfirst:}} – lower case output of the first character only
• {{ucfirst:}} – upper case output of the first character only