Enquiry on small caps in Russian

[Paul B. Gallagher]

William Ryan wrote:

> 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.

You make good points, but I would add that разрядка need not be done 
manually by inserting spaces. Simply select the text in question (in MS 
Word) and do Format | Font, "Character spacing" tab, and enter a 
positive value for "Spacing." For 12-point type, three points of extra 
spacing seems to work fairly well.

With this technique, Word will still spell-check and hyphenate 
correctly, and lines will break only at spaces and soft hyphens (of 
course, I have my headline styles set up with hyphenation disabled under 
Format | Paragraph | Line and Page Breaks).

If you wish, you can define a character style for this parallel to the 
built-in "Emphasis" and "Strong," and you can then assign a shortcut key 
to the style (I use ALT-E for "Emphasis" and ALT-S for "Strong") and 
apply it as quickly and easily as bolding or italic.

BTW, I agree that разрядка is ugly, but that may just be my foreign 
upbringing.

-- 
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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