Template:Smallcaps/doc

Smallcaps will display the lowercase part of your text as a soft format of typographical.

This template should be avoided or used sparingly, 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    :
 * Displayed:
 * 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.

Code examples
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" ( 1879).
 * , C., Jr (1879). "Piccadilly" in Dickens's Dictionary of London. London: C. Dickens.
 * To disambiguate Western names and surnames at a glance
 * Many Hispanic names are tricky to decompose:
 * Jorge Luis, but Adolfo (both filed under "B")
 * José, Marqués de los Trujillos
 * And many Hispanic names are better known by their second surname:
 * Pablo, Federico , Emir , José Luis
 * Many names (Martín, Miguel, Ramón, Tomás, etc.) can be either forename or surname:
 * Juan Martín vs. Rafael  (two ball players)
 * Hungarian names natively use the surname-first order:
 * Sándor is usually westernized Sándor
 * To disambiguate Eastern surnames and given names at a glance
 * Most Chinese names and Korean names retain their surname-first order:
 * Zedong fought Kai-shek
 * The movie Oldboy by Chan-wook starring  Min-sik was not seen by  Il-sung
 * Especially in Hong Kong and Macao, a Western given name may be added as well:
 * Leslie Kwok-Wing


 * Most Japanese names are reversed in the West, but not all:
 * (Akira or Motojirō  are usually westernized)
 * But Bashō,  no Komachi,  no Chiyo (haiku poets known under their given name)
 * But Ranpo (kept due to wordplay "EdgarA–llanPoe) vs. Ranpo  (some modern uses)
 * Burmese names ignore the concept of forename/surname, but are adapted in the West:
 * Daw Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San ("Daw" is honorific, her name take 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 ("Mister "), a.k.a. Thakin  ("Master ")

Technical
Technically, the template merely wraps the standard:



(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; }