Small Caps in Java

Question

To change letters to Upper Case, there's .toUpperCase(). To change letters to Lower Case, there's .toLowerCase().

Is there a way for the words to appear in small caps?

(Small caps are uppercase with a lower font height, and some fonts have a special set of design for it.)

Answer 1

A String is always just a String. It contains no data about what font-height it has or anything like that. Smallcaps are really just a display-thing. The only way I see to get the SmallCaps info into a string is if you muckle about with a strange Locale and use some toUpperCase(yourStrangeLocale) (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#toUpperCase-java.util.Locale-). But even so, you would be mixing display-properties with 'raw' data properties.

Your best way forward, in my opinion, is basically to do string.toUpperCase() and then for every sentence do .charAt(0) and increase the font-size for that char.

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Edit as unicode was mentioned in the comments.

If your system supports unicode, then you can simply input the unicode-chars for your text as unicode actually defines separate chars for these. Java still don't have any method to get these chars as they hold no extra meaning rather than emphasis, just like italics and bold don't hold any value in a String.

What you can do, if you don't want to capitilize and change font-size, is write your own String toSmallCaps(String input) method inwhere you go char-for-char and replace it with its unicode-smallcaps counterpart. Here's a list for the codes: http://www.calcresult.com/reference/text/unicode-list.html

Answer 2

Smallcaps is a font property - java is basically blind to it. So just convert case on java side as you like, and use proper fornts on the frontend side ( CSS in a web page for example )