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I am doing my resume right now, and I have a lot of acronyms. I'm using an OpenType font, so I've always put those acronyms in small caps. I've never quite been sure what to do, though, when a heading line or a list item begins with an acronym. When it begins with any other word, I would capitalize that first word. But with an acronym that's set in small caps, do I bump the first letter up to regular caps? Looks weird, to my eye.
Small caps alone
Small caps with full caps
Butterick's guide to typography is my go-to typographical reference, here's what it says on the matter:
With small caps, it’s your call whether to use regular capital letters at the beginning of capitalized words. I prefer not to.
This is a matter of preference....
For Acronyms I would use all uppercase. Small caps is fine if mid sentence and the entire acronym is small caps.
However, starting a sentence or section should be all caps for acronyms. There should not be any visual variance in the size of the glyphs in an acronym, ever. That kind of defeats the acronym itself.
There should not be any visual variance in the size of the glyphs in an acronym, ever. That kind of defeats the acronym itself. Thank you for putting that into words. That's really been my hangup with this, I think.
I haven't read any hard-and-fast rules and seems to come down to personal preference in much of the reading I've done on this. A key factor is being consistent, choosing a typeface with small caps, and applying proper letterspacing.
Some suggest rewording a sentence so it doesn't need to start with an acronym but that seems an unlikely approach in formatting a list of technical skills on your resume. In prose that's more easily done.
Refer to http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/book-design-part-5/ (the "Book Design Tip: Use Small Caps to represent Characters in a Play", and "Book Design Tip: Use Small Caps for Elegant Headlines" sections). There, I think the mixing of full cap with small caps works quite well.
As the convention for sentences is to begin with a capital, our eyes are trained for this and so I think full cap/small cap mixing is perfectly acceptable and more visually pleasing at the beginning of a line.
