What follows is just my opinion . . .

1. The accents you need for small caps are all the ones you need with upper & lower case. If you don't have all of them, you are playing an odds game; betting that when you need small caps, you won't need a particular accent. Over 25 years of setting type has shown me this is not a good bet.

2. As glyphs, I would use the lowercase accents, not the ones over capitals. My belief is that the flattened accents over caps came about so lines could be set with minimal leading. Setting solid or with 1-2 points lead can give a problem if an accented cap appeares directly below a letter with a descender. When you use lc accents with small caps, they may have to be positioned a bit higher of course.

3. Any special accents to go over caps or small caps should not be given a Unicode number, only a name. To the best of my knowledge, there is no universal name that would make an applications program pick the right one. If you are using FontLab to create precomposed characters, the name is XXXX.case. (e.g., macron.case) works fine. If you then click on cells for Unicode 0100 and 0101, the "macron.case" accent will be used for 0100, and the "regular" macron for 0101.

But as far as I know, if you enter the hex sting string 0041 and 0304, you are not guaranteed getting the "capital" macron in all applications programs -- one thing that for me tips the scales toward using "ccmp" as opposed to, say, "mark".

Maybe one of the more knowledgeable OT features programmers will reply here.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, i know the needed accents for the small caps are the same as for upper and lowercase, my question was only about their scale and proportion in relationship with the ones in the upper and lowercase.

English is still a problem as it ain't my mother language :)

The height placement is more the issue. I make a set copying the lowercase diacritics and move the set up to the best position to suit the smcp glyphs.

ChrisL

Dear Charles Ellertson,
regarding your point 1., I wonder if you or others know how to sort out the Unicode placement of Turkish small cap ‘i- with the dot.’
Thank you.

Thank you, kind Karsten Luecke pointed me to this thread :
http://typophile.com/node/29469 — my case "closed."