Hello, I know that there may be issues with higher priorities for the DejaVu fonts, but please consider adding small capital letters (small caps). Small caps are typographically useful especially for linguists. They have a typographical tradition of writing particular meanings in interlinearized texts in small capital letters. For now it would suffice to have just the plain face in small caps, later one could add italic small caps, bold small caps, and bold italic small caps. This would tremendously improve the typographical value of DejaVu fonts since only very few OpenType fonts have all these small caps. DejaVu would then be an option also for typesetters who don't necessarily need DejaVu's marvellous character inventory.
Steps to do this: • Open the font in fontforge • Select the majuscules of interest • Element/Style/Add Small Capitals... • Decide on the scaling factors in that dialog and that will generate proper (albeit unhinted) small caps with .sc names. The cpsc and similar otf features may need to be added manually. I’m not certain of the best scaling factors for DejaVu, it may require some experimentation to get optimal results. . . .
If it's that easy, then there's nothing to stop you from making a patch :-) While I haven't tested it, I guess the result would still need a lot of cleaning up so I don't think it's entirely straight forward to do. Pierre-Luc Auclair was working on smallcaps for serif. He currently doesn't have time to finish it, but I've asked them to send it to the mailing list to see where we can get from what he has done so far.
> If it's that easy, then there's nothing to stop you from making a patch :-) Actually, I am working on some python code to do it for all faces in one fell swoop. Much easier than plodding through GUI. I got distracted by an (unrelated) Xlib bug, but I have a good idea of what the code needs to look like, so it shouldn't take too long to type in and test.... [He says optimisticly.]
It would be nice to have all extended characters with smallcaps too, not just the basic ones.
Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.