Template:Smallcaps

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{{Smallcaps}} will display the lowercase part of your text as a soft format of typographical small caps.
For example: {{smallcaps|Beware of Dog}} → Beware of Dog.

This template should be avoided or used sparingly in articles, as the Manual of Style advises that small caps should be avoided and reduced to one of the other title cases or normal case and markup should be kept simple.

Usage

Your source text is not altered in the output, only the way it is displayed on the screen: a copy-paste of the text will give the small caps sections in their original form; similarly, an older or non-CSS browser will only display the original text on screen.

Code

{{Smallcaps|Your Text in 4004 BC}}

Displayed

Your Text in 4004 BC

Pasted

Your Text in 4004 BC

This template is therefore intended for the use of caps as a typographic style, such as rendering family names in bibliographies in small caps to distinguish them from given names. It should not be used for acronyms or abbreviations which are supposed to be capitalized regardless of style. For such cases, use {{Smallcaps all}}.

Notes

• Diacritics (å, ç, é, ğ, ı, ñ, ø, ş, ü, etc.) are handled. However, because the job is performed by each reader's browser, inconsistencies in CSS implementations can lead to some browsers not converting certain rare diacritics.
• Use of this template does not generate any automatic categorization. As with most templates, if the argument contains an = sign, the sign should be replaced with {{=}}, or the whole argument be prefixed with 1=. And for wikilinks, you need to use piping. There is a parsing problem with MediaWiki which causes unexpected behavior when a template with one style is used within a template with another style.
• There is a problem with dotted and dotless I. {{Lang|tr|{{Smallcaps|ı i}}}} gives you ı i, although the language is set to Turkish.
• Do not use this inside citation templates, or this template's markup will be included in the COinS metadata. This means that reference management software such as Zotero will store the markup. For example, if {{smallcaps}} is used to format the surname of Bloggs, Joe in {{cite journal}}, then Zotero will store the name as <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Bloggs</span>, Joe. This is incorrect COinS metadata.

Code examples

	Code	Display (screen)
Y	{{Smallcaps|The ''Name'' of the 2nd Game}}	The Name of the 2nd Game
Y	Leonardo {{Smallcaps|DiCaprio}} (born 1974)	Leonardo DiCaprio (born 1974)
Y	José {{Smallcaps|Álvarez de Toledo y Gonzaga}}	José Álvarez de Toledo y Gonzaga
Y	{{Smallcaps|Nesbø, Vågen, Louÿs, Zúñiga, Kabaağaçlı}}	Nesbø, Vågen, Louÿs, Zúñiga, Kabaağaçlı
When your text uses an = sign:
N	{{Smallcaps|You and Me = Us}}	{{{1}}}
Y	{{Smallcaps|You and Me = Us}}	You and Me = Us
Y	{{Smallcaps|You and Me {{=}} Us}}	You and Me = Us
Y	{{Smallcaps|1=You and Me = Us}}	You and Me = Us
When your text uses a template:
N	in {{Smallcaps|Fiddler's {{Green{{!}}Green}}}} forever	Green}} forever
Y	in {{Smallcaps|1=Fiddler's {{Green|Green}}}} forever	in Fiddler's Green forever
Y	in {{Smallcaps|Fiddler's {{Green|Green}}}} forever	in Fiddler's Green forever
Y	{{Green|1=in {{Smallcaps|Fiddler's Green}} forever}}	in Fiddler's Green forever
Y	{{Colors|green|yellow|3=in {{Smallcaps|Fiddler's Green}} forever}}	Colors – List of colors Cyan Magenta Black Gray Silver White Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet Gold Olive Purple Brown
When your text uses a | pipe:
N	{{Smallcaps|Before|afteR}}	Before
N	{{Smallcaps|1=Before{{!}}afteR}}	afteR
Y	{{Smallcaps|Before|afteR}}	Before|afteR
When your text uses a link:
N	[[{{Smallcaps|Mao}} Zedong]]	[[Mao Zedong]]
Y	[[Mao Zedong|{{Smallcaps|Mao}} Zedong]]	Mao Zedong

Note that most of these uses are not sanctioned by the WP:Manual of Style and should be avoided in article prose.

Reasons to use small caps

Small caps are useful for encyclopedical and typographical uses including:

To lighten ALL-CAPS surnames mandated by citation styles such as Harvard

• Piccadilly has been compared to "a Parisian boulevard" (Dickens 1879).
• Dickens, C., Jr (1879). "Piccadilly" in Dickens's Dictionary of London. London: C. Dickens.[1]

To disambiguate Western names and surnames at a glance

• Many Hispanic names are tricky to decompose:
  • Jorge Luis Borges, but Adolfo Bioy (both filed under "B")
  • José Álvarez, Marqués de los Trujillos
• And many Hispanic names are better known by their second surname:
  • Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Federico García Lorca, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
• Many names (Martín, Miguel, Ramón, Tomás, etc.) can be either forename or surname:
  • Juan Martín Hernández vs. Rafael Martín Vázquez (two ball players)
• Hungarian names natively use the surname-first order:
  • Petőfi Sándor is usually westernized Sándor Petőfi

To disambiguate Eastern surnames and given names at a glance

• Most Chinese names and Korean names retain their surname-first order:
  • Mao Zedong fought Chiang Kai-shek
  • The movie Oldboy by Park Chan-wook starring Choi Min-sik was not seen by Kim Il-sung

Especially in Hong Kong and Macao, a Western given name may be added as well:

• Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing

• Most Japanese names are reversed in the West, but not all:
  • (Akira Kurosawa or Motojirō Kajii are usually westernized)
  • But Matsuo Bashō, Ono no Komachi, Kaga no Chiyo (haiku poets known under their given name)
  • But Edogawa Ranpo (kept due to wordplay "EdgarA–llanPoe) vs. Ranpo Edogawa (some modern uses)
• Burmese names ignore the concept of forename/surname, but are adapted in the West:
  • Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San ("Daw" is honorific, her name takes part of his name)
• And some Burmese names are so short they need to retain an honorific prefix (U for Mister, Daw for Madam, Thakin for Master) which is confusable with a forename or a surname:
  • U Nu ("Mister Nu"), a.k.a. Thakin Nu ("Master Nu")

To cite Unicode character names correctly without unwanted emphasizing

• Such names are required to be written in capitals by the Unicode standard. In running text, “U+022A latin capital letter o with diaeresis and macron” is a less predominant alternative to “U+022A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON”.

Technical

Technically, the template merely wraps the standard:

<span style="font-variant:small-caps;"> ... </span>

(The "font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase" has not been used because it does not work at least in Internet Explorer 5 and 6, which are still fairly common browsers.)

Suppressing small caps

If you wish to suppress the display of small caps in your browser, as a logged in user, you can make an edit to your common.css reading

span.smallcaps { font-variant: normal !important; }

See also

Templates that change the display (copy-paste will get the original text):

• {{Allcaps}} – upper-case display
• {{Nocaps}} – lower-case display
• {{Smallcaps}} – small-caps display
• {{Smallcaps all}} – hard-formatted small-caps display
• {{Fixcaps}} – capitalizes words {{fixcaps|pLAy/tHE/GamE}} → Template:Fixcaps

Magic words that rewrite the output (copy-paste will get the text as displayed):

• {{lc:}} – lower case output of the full text
• {{uc:}} – upper case output of the full text
• {{lcfirst:}} – lower case output of the first character only
• {{ucfirst:}} – upper case output of the first character only

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Smallcaps/doc. (edit | history)
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (create | mirror) and testcases (create) pages.
Add categories to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template.