Minion + Greek + Small Caps

Question

Hello,

I'm typing the Greek alphabet with minion pro, and when I try to make something small caps... it doesn't work.

I've searched adobe fonts and can't find anything obvious to help. Of course I can change fonts, but it seems like it would be a weird oversight if there were really no Greek small caps with minion.

Any help would be appreciated!

Scott Falkner · Accepted Answer

It would appear there is no Greek small caps built into Minion Pro.

You can achieve what you want using GREP Styles if there is a way to target lowercase Greek letters. I don’t think there is a wildcard specific to lowercase Greek letters so you would have to use or (vertical bar) between each letter you want to find. Then apply a small caps character style. I find the best way to make that is to use horizontal and vertical scaling then increase the font weight a bit (normal to semibold, for example).

Here I have made a small caps character style that uses Minion Pro Caption, vertical scaling is 67%, horizontal scaling is 70%. I then used a GREP Style to apply it to lowercase Greek letters with this term:

(α|β|γ|δ|ε|ζ|η|θ|ι|κ|λ|μ|ν|ξ|ο|π|ρ|ς|σ|τ|υ|φ|χ|ψ|ω|\l)

Marc Autret · Answer

Hi @315741944lg7,

To complete Scott's answer, note that the GREP pattern \l alone already captures any lowercase letter (including in Greek), so (α|β|γ|δ|ε|ζ|η|θ|ι|κ|λ|μ|ν|ξ|ο|π|ρ|ς|σ|τ|υ|φ|χ|ψ|ω|\l) is redundant.

1. If you want to specifically capture lowercase Greek letters, then [α-ω] is shorter and usually sufficient.

2. The basic Greek and Coptic Unicode block has additional lowercase characters with diacritics, hence you can extend the pattern to [\x{3AC}-\x{3CE}] for a better coverage.

3. The Greek Extended block might be required too (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_script_in_Unicode). In that case a lookahead is useful to preselect lowercase letters before you specify the class:
(?=\l)[\x{370}-\x{3FF}\x{1F00}-\x{1FFF}]

Here is how this works in InDesign with the corresponding GREP styles (rendered in blue) applied to a sample text in Minion Pro:

Best,

Marc

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