Vision’s Edge’s Acronyms is a free XTension for QuarkXPress 6 or 7 that searches your Layout for uppercase acronyms and replaces them with lower case Small Caps.
You control the minimum and maximum number of uppercase characters it should consider an acronym, and you can optionally confirm each conversion.
Bonus tip:
You’ll have MUCH NICER small caps if you change Quark’s Small Caps preference from its default width and height (75%) to 85% high and 90% wide in QuarkXPress> Preferences> Print Layout> Character.
October 6th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I’m a similar believer in ‘bigging up’ the typesize options in QuarkXPress’ Character defaults. Another thing I tend to do for most layout templates is to change the Subscript defaults to Offset: 20%, VScale: 80% and HScale: 80%. For most fonts, this makes the subscript character acceptably small without being difficult to read (especially important in newsprint), while keeping it just above the lowest point reached by natural descenders. I’m not entirely convinced by OpenType subscript glyphs - they tend to be tiny.
October 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Thanks, Alistair! I had been looking for a good set of replacement defaults for Subscript.
This ability to control the height AND width of the small caps in QuarkXPress is one feature that InDesign doesn’t have. (You can control the height in InDesign, but not the width — which just makes for ugly small caps at a different size.)
For an acronym-heavy publication such as Design Tools Monthly, being able to use small caps for the acronyms makes the pages SO MUCH more readable. Otherwise it starts to look like a computer textbook. The combination of the automatic conversion done by this Acronyms XTension, and changing the default Small Caps proportions in QuarkXPress does the trick!