Need proper term for a specific capitalization style

[ThomasGalloway]

I'm looking for the proper terminology for the style of all caps with the initial letter a number of font sizes larger.  Sort of drop caps without the drop.

[Riccardo Sartori]

Small caps (as opposed to “all small caps”).

[ThomasGalloway]

Thanks, Riccardo.  I appreciate the rapid response.

I had considered small caps, but the size of the initial character threw me off.  Now I realize it is just an upper case small cap, no?

[Riccardo Sartori]

15 minutes ago, ThomasGalloway said:

it is just an upper case small cap

Actually, it’s a plain capital letter: small caps are a stylistic variant of lowercase.

[ThomasGalloway]

Attached is an example of two envelopes (printed by a government printing office, mid-20th century), with the address area pre-printed with "POSTMASTER," in the middle.  Notice that they are slightly different.  I would like to be able to properly describe these two to others in a paper or journal.

Typography is not my are of expertise/work, thus I'm seeking the kind assistance of this forum.

[Riccardo Sartori]

Your samples use typefaces that actually don’t have a lowercase, but only small caps.

The first one looks something like Blair/Engravers Gothic:

download at MyFonts

While the other one is a version of Copperplate Gothic:

download at MyFonts

 

[Ralf Herrmann]

Small Caps (for the second envelope), as already mentioned, is correct.

 

Footnote: It is a tricky term. Normally you have a either mixed-case text like here—OR ALL-CAPS. There can be glyphs which look like capital letters, but are drawn smaller and stand in for the regular lowercase letters. Strictly speaking, those are the actual “small caps”. 

In practise though, we call typesetting with both caps and small caps (as on your second envelope) and fonts which are specifically made for this kind of typesetting or app functions which create/call this behavior “small caps”.  It’s just easier to use this short term than to say what it actually means: “keep the capital letters but replace all lowercase letters with capital letters drawn smaller ”. 

 

[idiidiiidesign]

maybe an explanation for this tricky term:

if you have upper case letters (ACXZ…) in different sizes they are of different color (or greyness/darkness), therefore when mixing upper case letters in different sizes you might end up with a bigger first letter and the following letters seem to be thinner. therefore decent typography and fontdesign created small caps. these are constructed like upper case letters but have the size of lower case letters (acxz…) and augmented color/greyness/darkness, so they will be of the same color.