Re. Small caps for acronyms

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

 I agree that small caps are much more elegant for acronyms
 than standard capital letters, but they do pose problems.
 As a few folks have already noted, it's a fair bit of extra
 labor to select all occurrences of the acronym and change
 them (unless your software has a really nifty "replace text
 style" option in the search and replace dialog box). I also
 find that the acronyms look awkward at the beginning of a
 sentence, particularly if you use a regular (large) cap for
 the first letter of the acronym.

 There's also one significant gotcha if you move the text
 between software packages (e.g., to move it online): the
 translation often loses the information that defines the
 text as small caps, and you end up with an all-lowercase
 acronym! This occurs because most software either uses a
 specific font (e.g., the "expert version") or creates the
 small caps on the fly using some algorithm. When you move
 to a new application that implements small caps
 differently, boom! (_Not_ BOOM! <grin>)

 It's often simpler to just adjust the font size manually,
 dropping the size of the acronym's caps by a few points to
 produce something aesthetic. This will offend typographical
 purists (since the optical weight of a small caps font has
 been adjusted to match its reduced size), but the trick
 works well enough for readers (like me) who aren't
 sophisticated enough to spot the difference without looking
 carefully. The main gotcha is that transferring to an
 application that doesn't preserve font size information may
 not work... but at least you have an all-caps acronym.

 --Geoff Hart    @8^{)}
 geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca    <--- should be FERIC, but don't
                              tell the boss!

 Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of our
 reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.