Fonts with small capitals
Families issued as small-caps cuts, where the lowercase keys give capitals at x-height: for acronyms, headings, credits and refined body text.
Chapter the First
Small capitals are capital letterforms drawn at roughly the height of the lowercase. They are not shrunken capitals. A true small cap is redrawn so that its strokes match the weight of the surrounding text and its proportions are a little wider, whereas a scaled-down capital looks thin and pinched.
Their classic uses are quiet. Acronyms and abbreviations set in small caps stop shouting from the middle of a paragraph. The first words of a chapter, running heads, bylines, speaker names in plays and credits on a title page are traditional places for them. Set alone with wide letter spacing, they make dignified headings and labels.
Small caps reach you in two ways. Many text families include them as an OpenType feature, switched on with font-variant-caps in CSS or a menu option in design software. The families here take the other route: they are separate small-caps cuts, in which typing lowercase produces small capitals. Most store the small capitals in the lowercase positions, so they work in any program. A few keep ordinary lowercase in the file and swap it through a feature that browsers and layout applications apply by default; software that ignores OpenType features shows their plain lowercase, so test first. Most are companions to a regular family of the same name.
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Alegreya SC
Small capitals for a calligraphic text serif: five weights with italics, from Regular to Black.
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Alegreya Sans SC
Small capitals in a humanist sans, in seven weights with italics, Cyrillic and Greek.
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Spectral SC
Small capitals for a screen-first text serif, in seven weights with italics.
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Cormorant SC
Small capitals in place of lowercase in a light display serif, in five weights.
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Playfair Display SC
High-contrast capitals in two heights, in three weights with italics.
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Bona Nova SC
Small capitals for a calligraphic serif, with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic.
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Marcellus SC
Flared-serif capitals in two heights, modeled on Roman inscriptions.
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IM Fell English SC
Small capitals that keep the rough edges of seventeenth-century printing.
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Anton SC
Small capitals for a heavy, tightly condensed advertising sans, for headlines in two heights.
Samples load a basic Latin subset of each family. Every family here carries an open license; its page states the terms and offers the original files.
Questions about fonts with small capitals
What is the difference between real and fake small caps?
Real small caps are drawn as their own glyphs with matching stroke weight. Fake ones are capitals scaled down by software, which makes them look too light and narrow.
How do I type small caps with these fonts?
Type in lowercase. The lowercase keys produce small capitals and the shift key gives full capitals. In a few of these families the swap is an OpenType feature that is on by default, so it needs software that applies such features.
When should text be set in small caps?
For acronyms inside running text, for opening words, subheadings, bylines and credits. Long passages entirely in small caps are tiring to read.
Are these small-caps fonts free for commercial publishing?
Yes. Every family listed here is under the SIL Open Font License, which permits commercial use, embedding and modification; the fonts may not be sold on their own.