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As Powerpoint 2016 does not allow for using dedicated (prettier) OpenType small caps—but instead creates its own poorly spaced alternative—I'd like to create a dedicated (TrueType) small caps version of an existing OpenType font that already has small caps.
Is this possible, and what tooling would I need for doing so?
I was going to suggest using FontForge, which is free and open source, but it can be a little user unfriendly at times and I struggled to get this working in any reasonably easy way with a font that had a large number of small caps (including small cap versions of accented characters and punctuation etc.).
Glyphs (Mac only sorry) is a lot more user friendly and got me where I needed to be a lot quicker so I'll give a quick run down of how to do this in Glyphs.
Glyphs isn't free but there is a fully functional trial that'll work perfectly well for this.
There is a "Smallcaps" filter on the left sidebar under "Letter", but that will only show you small cap variants of letters, not anything else (e.g. punctuation). If you only have small cap letters then the default filter will work fine, otherwise you can create your own filter...
Small caps will be named with a suffix of ".sc" so you can set up a smart filter to show you anything with that suffix. Just hit the cog at the very bottom left of the sidebar and choose "Add Smart Filter":
Set your filter to show "Glyph Name" "ends with" ".sc".
You now have a custom filter in the sidebar to show you all the small caps available in the font.
Use the small caps filter to compare with the rest of the font and and delete all the lowercase variants that you have small caps for; this'll generally be everything you see from the "lowercase" filter and maybe some punctuation and other stuff.
(Just select the glyphs you want to delete and go to Glyphs → Remove Glyph.)
Glyphs automatically maps your exported font based on the glyph names so all you need to do is rename the small caps to remove the ".sc" suffix.
There is a handy find & replace that works on glyph names so just go to your small caps filter, select all the glyphs and go to Edit → Find → Find & Replace.
Enter ".sc" in to the "Find" field and leave "Replace" empty. Hit "Replace"...
Done. Export your font (File → Export...) and you're good to go.
Glyphs is scriptable so you could cut down on the time this takes (mostly the time it takes to figure out which glyphs need deleting), but doing it manually took me no more than 5–10 minutes so there's probably no point unless you're doing this often or you have some awkward fonts that have non-complete sets of small caps.
Yes, I just tested it and only needed Font Forge. You can get it from Font Forge's Git Hub
After installing, you open the typeface (select the correct file with the weight-width-and-slant you need from the windows font folder) and select all the glyphs corresponding to the small capitals (using the shift key). The small capitals are usually almost at the end of the font, or you can find it by using the menu View > Go To and writing "a.sc", for the small capital A.
Now create a new font at File > New and paste the small capitals where the lowercase letters are. Repeat for the Uppercase (selecting from the Basic Latin block, you can use the Go To box for that too). Remember to create a space glyph, or you will get a box when you type a space. It is the glyph just before the "!", you can also copy this.
Name your font before generating it! In Element > Font Info select the PS Names tab and write a name without spaces.
Now, you generate your font file. Select File > Generate Fonts... enter a name for your font and select "True-Type" from the pull-down. Push "Generate" and ignore any warning. You must have now a TTF file with the glyphs you copied, i.e., the same Capitals and the small capitals instead of the lowercase letters.
Install your font before opening Power Point and enjoy.
EDIT: You can obviously modify the existing file, replacing the lowercase with the small caps using the same procedures, and re-generating your font with another name and another filename. Just be careful to change the family name everywhere in the Font Info, or you will get a mess.
