Enquiry on small caps in Russian

[William Ryan]

Thanks Paul. Very useful tips. I haven't had to do this often, and hope 
I won't in future, but it is nice to know it can be automated.
Will


Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> 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.
>

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