Enquiry on small caps in Russian

[William Ryan]

I haven't tried many fonts with this but I think in fact the small caps 
Paul describes are in fact pseudo-small caps, i.e. simply scaled-down 
caps, just as many True Type italics used to be just slanted roman, and 
bold was simply emboldened roman. For most readers (including me) 
scaled-down caps will not normally attract attention as being inelegant, 
but serious professionals probably notice and disapprove.

Spacing-out was used in Germany and to some extent the Netherlands for 
emphasis and sometimes for book titles in bibliography, but I have the 
impression that italic is now gaining in use (although 'German Bold 
Italic', which dominated the results of a quick Google search, turned 
out to be a song by Kylie Minogue). The reason used to be that italic 
does not mix with Fraktur, and later the spacing-out convention became 
useful as an italic substitute for typewriters, just as in English we 
may still use underlining for the same purpose. I imagine that the 
Russian razriadka was borrowed from the German convention. Some Russian 
style sheets nowadays stipulate that italic should be used instead of 
razriadka, which makes good sense in a digital environment where 
automatic justification of lines can make razriadka difficult to 
distinguish. Razriadka is also more trouble to type than kursiv (twice 
as many keystrokes), awkward for line-end hyphenation, and less 
economical on the page. Personally I have always found razriadka ugly 
and untidy, and difficult to read if it continues for more than a few 
words, while the kursiv for many Russian fonts is in fact very attractive.

Will Ryan


Paul B. Gallagher wrote:

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.
---
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.

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