Following news earlier today that a font designer changed the old-style “1” in his font because Al Gore noticed it was too confusing with the “I” in his new book, Joe Clark argues that using small caps for acronyms in the first place is old-style thinking:

This nonsense, promulgated by snobs like that bore Bringhurst who have not read anything written after Jane Austen croaked, ostensibly improves typographic colour. What it actually does is inhibit reading: Acronyms are not regular words. All-small-caps setting fools the reader into thinking an acronym is a real world. That discomfort you feel is a reverse fixation you underwent trying to reread the word.

Bringhurst is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style, considered by most amateurs (including me) to be an invaluable manifesto of what to do, or at least to what you should aspire, when putting letters together. Section 3.3.2 of that book says “For abbreviations and acronyms in the midst of normal text, use spaced small caps.”

Surprisingly, that section doesn’t exactly explain why, but the idea is logical. All uppercase text stands out when reading, both altering the typographic “color” of the page and making speedier readers pause. The idea is that a brand name like “BMW” is not more important than the rest of the words around it (BMW’s marketing department notwithstanding), so it should not be taller and “blacker” than the other words. Capital letters should draw attention to the beginnings of sentences and to proper nouns, not to abbreviations or acronyms.

Having been an old Apple IIgs guy, where the “gs” is supposed to be in small caps, I’ve always remembered this. And we tried to use it for a while in MDJ and MWJ, but…no. It just doesn’t work. For starters, there are no small caps in ASCII/Unicode, so it would come out “IIgs” anyway. Second, if we ever publish in HTML, we still have little control over the browser and font technology used, and most small caps directives are either ignored or shrunken larger capital letters that look out of place, like this: Apple IIgs. That draws attention to it worse than “Apple IIGS” would.

And that’s really the kicker: Clark points out that in today’s technocratic world, you simply can’t put abbreviations and acronyms in small caps because they wind up looking worse. Plurals should not have apostrophes, but without them, you get abominations like bmws. Unless your font has excellent old-style numerals, you wind up with really strange letter heights in names like “Mac os x 10.6.2” or “Mac os 9.”

A couple of years ago, I tried a test that would use oldstyle numerals and small caps wherever possible, but compared to the traditional “regular caps” way, it just looked weird:

In this particular example, it only looks weird-weird in phrases like “Apple hdv Codec” and “dvd Studio Pro.” Worse was realizing exactly how much work it would take on every item to think about which acronyms and abbreviations would look decent in small caps, and which would not. MDJ’s body font is Minion Pro, which has a nicely drawn set of small caps. The headline font is Myriad Pro, which does not, so those have to be faked manually whenever they’re needed. Plus, it’s lexically weird: as you can see if you view source, the literal text behind “dvd Studio Pro” is “dvd Studio Pro,” which would then need upshifting for every venue that doesn’t have small caps (like E-mail).

I agree with the intent that capital letters should not draw attention to acronyms and abbreviations, but in today’s world, trying to use small caps instead winds up bringing them more attention, defeating the entire purpose of the guideline. In the image above, the paragraph on the left reads well enough and can be reused as is in other formats. The one on the right took longer to prepare, still looks funny in some places, and needs upshifting for text-only media without small caps.

There’s just no point to signing up for extra work if it doesn’t accomplish the goal for doing it in the first place. But it would be nice if abbreviations and acronyms could appear more elegantly everywhere.