Small Capitals in Quotations
When to reproduce, and when to normalise, small caps in quoted text.
Small capitals are capital letterforms drawn at roughly x-height. They appear in quoted material for several distinct reasons: as a typographic convention of the original edition, as the standard rendering of the divine name in some English Bibles (LORD), as legal drafting emphasis, and as the traditional treatment of the first line after a drop cap.
The editorial question is whether the small caps carry meaning or only style. Meaningful small caps — the LORD case, where they encode a different underlying word in the source language — must be preserved. Purely typographic small caps may be normalised to roman, with a note if the change is substantive.
Technically, real small caps come from the font's dedicated glyphs via font-variant-caps or an OpenType feature. Scaling ordinary capitals down produces letters whose strokes are too light beside the surrounding text — a visible defect at large sizes.
Common mistake: setting an entire quoted passage in small caps for emphasis. Small caps are for short runs; a paragraph of them reads slower than the same text in roman and defeats the purpose.
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
Keep reading the glossary
Italics for whole, self-contained works; quotation marks for parts contained within them.
A parenthetical note telling the reader that italics or bolding in a quotation come from the quoter, not the original author.
The curled apostrophe (’) used in typeset text, as opposed to the straight foot-mark (').
The typographic conventions for the quotation that opens a book or chapter.