TYPING IN ALL CAPS is not as good as applying All Caps Style
You probably already know that IT’S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS IN INDESIGN!
This isn’t because people will think you’re yelling… no, I say it because you might want to change your mind later (which requires you to retype it). So instead, type in sentence-case or lower-case, and then — if you want it to appear in capital letters — apply the All Caps style. That’s the button in the Control panel that looks like TT.
Or, if you’re applying the style using a paragraph style or character style, you can set it in the style definition:
Then, later, it’s easy to change, right? Just remove the formatting.
HOWEVER, a funny thing sometimes happens when you apply ALL CAPS.
ALL CAPS vs. ALL CAPS
Nyoka H. recently pointed out a strange inconsistency when applying the All Caps styling to text. In the image below, the first line has been typed in ALL CAPS and the second line has been typed in lower-case and the All Caps styling applied to it:
Can you see the difference? The second line is longer!
Now, here’s the crazy part: In most fonts this doesn’t happen. But in a few fonts (notably many “Pro” fonts from Adobe), it does.
I reached out to font expert Thomas Phinney to ask why, and he explained that some OpenType fonts have two extra settings: “cap spacing” and “uppercase alternates.” There is no user-interface for turning these on or off in InDesign, but when you apply the All Caps styling (that TT button), they get activated!
Thomas explained: “Some OpenType fonts have a specific fontwide spacing adjustment programmed in for all-caps settings. Generally it is a bit looser. Often fairly subtly so, just a few units.” and “Some OpenType fonts adjust position (or even shape/size) of some glyphs in all-caps situations. Commonly this is used on hyphens and dashes, the Spanish inverted question mark, and a few others. Sometimes it affects numerals.”
For example, you can see how the punctuation changes in the following image (with some guides added to help):
So, here’s yet another reason to use the All Caps styling rather than typing in all caps: You can get added, bonus OpenType features to help make your text look even more awesome.
thnx for clearing that up! :D i’ll keep it in mind!
One other good reason for not writing in all caps, even if it’s a header: the ACTUAL TYPING is what will get pulled into Bookmarks or Table of Contents entries. And a set of bookmarks ALL IN ALL CAPS is hella ugly.
From a workflow POV, I always suggest that Word templates be configured to show the actual case, not all-caps. This makes it faster for editorial to verify that the authors are writing to the appropriate style and to fix it if necessary.
Adam, right on! In addition to that, InDesign is also smart enough to save the “original text” into a PDF, so if you copy it out of it, you will get the uncapitalized text again. So don’t use All Caps for things that should STAY in caps (such as UNESCO, UN) but DO use it for things such as all-caps headings. I go as far as that if they have All Caps applied in their style, I STILL make sure they are “actually” correctly capitalized ‘underneath’.
I totally agree with the reasons for using the palette, instead of keying in all capital letter. But…
We have one client (a major book publisher) who insists we cannot use the palette—that anything that is all capitalized (i.e., heads, part and chapter titles, etc), must be keyed in all caps. Of course, this always causes extra work. If the chapter title is all caps, and the running heads are Upper & Lower Case, then many times I have to create separate master pages for some chapters when the “Title Case” feature doesn’t work properly using variables (i.e., words such as “of,” “the,” etc.).
This publisher claims that using the palette is a no-no. That unless the heads and titles are typed in all caps, they will convert to Upper & Lower Case when creating the eBook if the palette is used. (Note: the publisher has their own eBook department and they do the eBooks from the print books. I don’t make eBooks though I know the basics).
Basically—they want us to do the print book while at the same time, following all the eBook rules. Nevermind that it’s not always possible.
Ha! All true. We are a medium-sized publishing company but we do not have our own eBook department. We repurpose our print files in multiple ways, some ePub, some optimized PDFs for online downloads, etc. Those are our rules too, so I winced when I saw this article. The designers forget and they use that handy All Caps palette. Then Comp hates having to retype. I get it. But we have gone through plenty of pain with corrupt All Caps when files are converted. And, believe me, we experimented with every setting available to prevent it. At one point we discovered that converting to RGB was somehow causing the corruption in some files, as odd as that may sound. Until we can be certain that problem won’t crop up we’ll have to keep to the no All Caps rule.
I don’t understand why you don’t use the All Caps style for EPUB/ebooks. When InDesign exports a reflowable EPUB, it applies the CSS “text-transform:uppercase” to the text, which makes it appear in all uppercase in the EPUB reader.
Thanks for the reply, Marian. I must admit it is a pain when we can’t use the palette, especially because of running head variables and stuff. Do you get a lot of corruption when the small cap palette is used as well.
David, that’s absolutely true, of course. I only bring this up in response to Dwayne’ message. I thought our problems were pretty esoteric until he mentioned it. We have had no problems with All Caps in INDD to print PDFs, INDD to ePub, or INDD to optimized PDFs, and we’re quite happy with that. However, in our little niche (textbooks) we have to build our InDesign files as kind of Swiss Army knife files that can withstand anything we throw at them. The All Caps problems were in optimized PDFs which were made from copies of printer PDFs, so essentially more an Acrobat problem that INDD. But it was an expensive problem involving hundreds of files, and the problem originated with All Caps in InDesign. We try to stay away from that workflow now, but sometimes it’s still necessary.
Dwayne, we had problems with Small Caps in one instance with INDD 2015 to ePub. That may have been a font problem, solved with a fake Small Caps Character style. It seems to have been resolved in subsequent INDD versions anyway.
Thanks, Marian. We also started using a character style for the fake/generated small caps.
You can also use “change case” from the drop down type menu to FIX words keyed inappropriately. It will change to your choice of UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, or Sentence case. If nothing else it keeps you from having to retype the whole thing.
I agree. I just figured that Marian’s COMP overexaggerated when they said they retyped it.
In the first example, am I the only one who thinks the character spacing in the typed-in-caps line is better than in the line below it? In the styled line, the N and C in ONCE seem to me to be too far apart. Ditto NG in STRANGE and ND in LAND. So, at least for this font, I’d be balancing the certainty of having to do manual kerning against the possibility of having to retype. I certainly agree with Adam, tho’ — all caps in ToCs in ghastly.
I agree: the ‘caps spacing’ in this sample is not good.
Totally agree
Would someone straighten me out on this: does an all caps paragraph style export to ePub or not? I’ve seen some older posts that say you have to made all caps real all caps via Type/Change Case/Uppercase. I’m working on a book where the author has typed all his chapter titles in sentence case (in his Word doc), but wants them to be uppercase in the layout. I created uppercase chapter titles with a paragraph style. When I export the layout to Adobe Digital Editions, the titles go back to sentence case. When I view the ePub in iBooks, they are all caps. When I convert the ePub to .mobi using Kindle Previewer 3, they are upper case. I’m concerned that someone somewhere is going to be using some free ePub reader that won’t display these as all caps.
This post deserve a SHOUTOUT!
Sorry, it doesn’t deserve my typo.