字体设计基础（12）花式大写

Swash caps? Admitting that it's not the most urgent issue to learn in typography, it's interesting to quickly pay attention to this topic. Not every font family has a Swash variant. Most common are swash capitals, but also swash lowercase characters and swash-beginnings and -endings exist.

我承认，这不是学习字体设计最迫切需要了解的一节，但是这个话题很有趣，我们稍稍关注一下就好了。不是所有的字体家族都包含有花式的变体。最常见的一般是花式大写，但同样也有花式的小写以及花式的首字和尾字。

Sometimes you want to set a whole line in capitals. It's possible to do this with roman capitals, although sometimes it's better to choose small capitals which are designed for this purpose. Roman capitals are not, but mostly they don't cause problems. Swash capitals however do. Swash capitals are mostly designed to give some extra visual pleasure to your designs. The caps are meant to be followed by lowercase characters (number 1), or used as an initial (number 2), but not to be combined with eachother. Only with some fonts it's possible to combine swash capitals with normal roman caps (number 3).

有时候你想要设置整行的大写。可以用大写正体来完成这一任务，虽然小型大写可能是更好的选择——那才是为此而设计的。大写正体不是为了大写连排而设计的，但多数情况下它们也不会造成麻烦。而花式大写就不一样。花式大写的设计目的通常是用来为设计增添一些额外的视觉愉悦。其大写是为后面跟随小写字母而设计的（图1），或是用于首字下沉排版（图2），但绝非用于大写连排。只有某些特定的字体才有可能出现花式大写与普通正体大写的连排（图3）。

 

翻译：http://www.yeeyan.com/space/show/snlchina