Now the first thing you might be wondering is where would you get an Open Type Font from. Do you need to purchase one? Do you need to do something special? Well, there are a series of Open Type fonts that do ship with the Creative Suite and will have been installed on your system during that process.
What we are going to do is use one called Adobe Jenson Pro. Now that's usually the signal that a font is indeed an Open Type 1 because it uses the word Pro afterwards, and what we can do is either go out to the Font Menu list here and scroll through the list to find it or we can simply highlight the currently named font or just type-in Adobe and then J, and it should pick up Adobe Jenson Pro when it's in the list.
Now once it finds the name, make sure you hit Return or Enter to apply it and you will notice that it has now shifted to an Open Type font. Now hopefully one of the first things you will notice is that the Small Caps thing is not so much of an issue anymore. The small capital letters look a lot fatter and now much more closely the original capitals. This is all part of an Open Type font, now why is this so?
Well, bear in mind that a regular typeface such as Type 1 or True Type can only contain up to 256 characters, that's not very many large capitals, lowercase letters and everything else. So what happens there is when you use a small capital font it simply scales down a regular capital.
Open Type fonts however can contain up to 65,000 characters. So that gives typographers the option to generate specific characters for small capitals, alternative characters, different shape, numbers and everything else and give you more option as to what you want to display when you do type work. So in this case the small capitals we are seeing are specifically generated ones inside an Open Type font that match the weight of everything else, a really beautiful little option here.
Now another option about Open Type when using Small Caps is you don't have to use the regular small capitals option which is making capitals of the larger letters here. I don't want that, I want everything to be a small capital. Let's come up here to the Control Palette and disable the Small Capitals option and instead come to the right-hand side of the Control Palette where you will see a small fly-out icon, the first item there is Open Type.
If you look down the list there, there is an item that says All Small Caps. If you go ahead and choose that everything now changes to a small capital as opposed to lower case and everything is the same weight, so a really nice display of type.
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