Petite caps

Small caps, petite caps and italic used for emphasis

In typography, petite capitals (usually abbreviated petite caps, pron. [ˈpɛˌti kæps] or [pəˈtit kæps]) are a stylistic letter form, a variant of small caps. Like small caps, petite caps take the shape of upper-case ("capital") letters, and are usually of appropriate optical weight to harmonize with other text. However, petite caps are smaller still than small caps, typically, half the height of capital letters.

In computer fonts

The OpenType font standard provides support for transformations from normal letters to petite caps by two feature tags, pcap and c2pc.^[1] A font may use the tag pcap to indicate how to transform lower-case letters to petite caps, and the tag c2pc to indicate how to transform upper-case letters to petite caps.

Desktop publishing applications, as well as web browsers, can use these features to display petite caps. However, only a few^[2] currently do so.

In CSS

At this time, there is no direct support for petite caps in web pages using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language. However the working draft proposal of 2011^[3] by the W3C, describes CSS rules that would specify text presentation in petite caps, as well as many other typographic styles.

References