Re: [Groff] Proper Small Caps.

[Clarke Echols]

When I was working on HP-UX, deriving our content from AT&T documents,
acronyms and words consisting of uppercase letters were coded by AT&T as
\s-1HP-UX\s+1, etc.  It subdued the overbearing appearance of the
uppercase words so they blended better with normal font.

I don't recall ever seeing small-cap words anywhere in Unix
documents.

Clarke

On 01/20/2015 05:57 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> > Thought it might be of interest given troff's
> > long-time S\s-2MALL\s0 C\s-2APS\s0, especially used in the formatting of
> > Unix.  IIRC, Dennis Ritchie said they did it because the CAT gave them
> > the possibility, but it was regretted for the UNIX/Unix confusion it
> > caused.
>
> I think this is urban legend. Small caps were not used in UNIX
> manuals or in the Bell System Technical Journal articles about
> UNIX. Fairly early on, we in the Unix lab began to treat Unix
> as a proper noun, but the lawyers had trademarked the uppercase
> name and got their way in many publications, including the books
> by Kernighan and Ritchie and Kernighan and Pike. U\s-2NIX\s0
> was very rare, if it ever happened at all.
>
> I recoil from text infected with capital pox, and don't see
> small caps as much improvement. They do make sense in all-caps
> text, but sporadic S\s-2MALL\s0 C\s-2APS\s0 or anything like
> it is not a cure for the pox.
>
> Doug