Enquiry on small caps in Russian

[Paul B. Gallagher]

William Ryan wrote:

> Small caps are called kapiteli or kapitel'nyi shrift in Russian. Some 
> cyrillic fonts have them. Most unicode fonts don't as far as I can tell, 
> and most western digital fonts with a cyrillic subset remain unchanged 
> if you try to change to small cap.

The True Type fonts on my Windows system have always produced acceptable 
small caps for Cyrillic, at least in applications like MS Word. This 
includes fonts that are essentially Western fonts, such as Times New 
Roman, Arial, and Courier New. I haven't used the older Casady & Greene 
fonts in years, so I don't recall their behavior.

> For a brief technical discussion of cyrillic small cap see 
> http://www.paratype.ru/help/term/terms.asp?code=320
> Of actual current usage in Russian typographical design I have no 
> knowledge - my old Spravochnik zhuralista doesn't mention them - but 
> Russian Wikipedia (article on kapiteli) lists some current uses in 
> Russian and suggests that the use of properly designed cyrillic kapiteli 
> is growing.

A feature I frequently see in Russian texts that is generally not used 
in the West is s p a c i n g   o u t   e m p h a s i z e d   t e x t.

In my translations, I generally substitute /italics/, though in 
headlines small caps would also do.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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