Not true.

In this case, InDesign carefully follows the rules as laid out in the applied language for capitalizing and lowercasing text. You will see that if you change the language of your sample text to Turkish, it’ll translate lowercase dotted i’s into capital dotted i’s, and changing the case of un-dotted i’s doesn’t add the dots either.

“InDesign puts an i and a square there …”

The square isn’t Indesign’s fault either It’s more likely you experimented with a font that misses the intended glyph, so in this case InDesign did the right thing but you missed it because you selected a font without the required glyph.

I tested with Minion Pro, and all seems to work as designed.

“334 – ?mparator Konstantin dul ve yetimler için himaye yasas? ç?kard?.”

Note that the first character “?” has a dot on top of it, it is NOT the same as our upper case I. And that in the last word of the sentence, there are lower case “?” characters.
When changing case to upper case as described above, all “i” and “?” become “I”. Even worse is using the menu command Type>Change Case>UPPERCASE – this changes the characters for good, so when changing back to lowercase with Type>Change Case>lowercase or >Sentence case, all “?” are “i”.

>UPPERCASE: ?MPARATOR KONSTANTIN DUL VE YETIMLER IÇIN HIMAYE YASASI ÇIKARDI

<lowercase: i mparator konstantin dul ve yetimler için himaye yasasi çikardi

On the way back to lowercase, things go even more wrong for the uppercase i – InDesign puts an i and a square there, double byte error .
So the upper/lower case functions, OpenType or not, do not work properly on this character. I guess this is because the case translation isn't using Unicode, but some old code table.

I wish Adobe would fix this. It is a very stupid glitch that makes working with CE and CY documents unnecessarily risky. Changed cases are often used, and unless you are the creator of the document, you won't know until you select the text and look at the settings.

I don't know how many characters, in how many CE/CY languages, are affected by this. This one happens to be the one I know of.

The reason is entirely editorial. For instance, the plural of the abbreviation for Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).

Editors specify that the small caps for the acronym be large enough to be visible against the lower case s.

It’s really annoying to have to do workarounds to meet my client’s request.

I have brought this up to Adobe and they do not have an answer for it and do not seem to want to fix it.

If you are sending your files to a printer I would suggest only using the OpenType All Small Caps option or doing as Adam suggested…
a) changing the point size
b) horizontal scaling
c) baseline shift (for superscript/subscript)
d) font switch (greater weight or smaller optical master)

PostScript small caps always proved to be such a nightmare of inconsistent appearance/garbled output in our mixed PostScript/OpenType / QuarkXPress 4/InDesign CS/2/3 / mixed ability(!) environment that we had had to make a policy decision to avoid them.

Now that we’re doing all our new titles in CS2/3 and OpenType, might it be safe to consider dipping our toes in the small caps water again, or are there still potential pitfalls for the unwary?

We need to be able to guarantee consistent output between different users in different companies…

There was a problem in ID CS2 and CS3 where the small caps would not stay or became garbled.

But the reason I asked Alan that specifically was since you can use either Small Caps or OT All Small Caps to achieve what he describes (have it applied as a Character Style via Nested or GREP Styles) — and if you’re using an OT font w/small caps then it’d use the OT Small Caps glyphs regardless — I was fishing for what *other* reason. I was just curious.

For example, perhaps the trademark names he mentions are always entered as all caps (“PANTONE”) so only the OT All Small Caps option would have an effect on those.

You said, “the options that are NOT under the OpenType submenu can be applied to non-OT fonts, whereas the options under the OpenType will only be available for OT fonts.” Exactly. So choosing OpenType All Small Caps means that if you ever need to change the typeface to a non-OT font, or to an OT font without the Small Caps glyphs (such as Myriad Pro), then you lose the Small Caps formatting.

This specific result is what caused consternation among some InDesign users, the reason I wrote the post.

So … if you use the Small Caps choice, you gain flexibility (any typeface will become small capped, using the “nice glyphs” if available in the OT font, otherwise scaled as usual) but you lose some automation (automatic case change of caps to small caps, and automatic application of old style numerals).

I love how the OT All Small Caps works, myself, and think the resulting type looks elegant as heck. OTOH in a busy production environment or during development of styles, you need to be hyper-aware of how changing a typeface called for in a style will affect not just the shape of the glyphs but sometimes their case as well.

If it’s not clear already, the “(OT) All Small Caps” option will convert both uppercase and lowercase letters to Small Caps, whereas the “Small Caps” option will only affect lowercase letters.

The reason why the option is named OpenType All Small Caps instead of just All Small Caps is to make clear that only OpenType fonts — that have the OpenType layout features “Small Caps” (smcp) and “Caps to Small Caps” (c2sc) — will be affected.

BTW, if you look at the fly-out menu of the Character panel, you’ll see that the “All Small Caps” option is under the submenu “OpenType”, whereas the “Small Caps” option is not. (The same is true for “Discretionary Ligatures” and “Ligatures”; the former is under the “OpenType” submenu, whereas the latter is not). What this means is that the options that are NOT under the OpenType submenu can be applied to non-OT fonts, whereas the options under the OpenType will only be available for OT fonts. (Of course, just because a font is in OpenType format does not guarantee that it will have all the OpenType features/options available).