Torgeir, I gather the limitations on fonts were the amount of glyphs it could hold. Thus some designers either left out true small caps and things like old style numbers. The reason I bring this up is with Open Type that will change. The amount of glyphs an Open Type font can support is huge. So look for OT on future purchaces of typefaces.

As for Swash Caps they are ment to be used sparingly. I also use Small Caps sparingly. For body text its Roman. For emphsis its Italic.

I don't know if glyph amount limitation has been the cause, there are often separate fonts for small caps (and text figures). But maybe Open Type will change the situation either way.

My understanding of small caps is that they're used for e.g. initialisms (if that's what you mean by sparingly?). The problem of italic small caps appeared when I wanted to emphasize a phrase/expression containing an initialism, but unless I misunderstand, using italic small caps for these rare cases would be prefered?

>Torgeir, I gather the limitations on fonts were the amount of glyphs it could hold. Thus some designers either left out true small caps and things like old style numbers. The reason I bring this up is with Open Type that will change.

Torgeir, Daniel is exactly correct. If you look at a new big re-release of an older font family in OpenType, you'll see that these things have been added in where they weren't previously. Avenir NEXT, for instance, has italic small caps and old style figures. The old Avenir had neither SC nor OSF in any of its weights.

Often in text, small caps serve a very good visual role�they keep the grey matter grey. For instance, long strings of caps is visually very distrurbing. In a text about the Cold War, you'd have USA and USSR cropping up non-stop. Small Caps make these texts look better and more even.

When a sentence in this cold war sample text would be set in italic for emphasis, the small cap rules should apply, too right? Well, with new OpenType fonts, it can, and it will in the right hands.

I see, I just wasn't sure since some fonts (e.g. Minion) have italic small caps in the Type 1 version as well. Thanks for clearing it up, and both of you for the help!