small caps not working in Illustrator

[JamieNHW]

I am trying to use small caps, but it doesn't seem to be working correctly; I tried to look to see if there is a bug but have not found anything. I typed the text WILSON, and when I clicked on the small caps icon, nothing happened. I tried in multiple fonts and formats, but it doesn't change. I verified that small caps are set to 50% in my document setup (it was set to 75%), but my clients original is closer to 50% 

Illustrator v 26.5

Mac

[kglad]

<moved from using the community >

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

When you type "WILSON", are you typing it in all caps as you posted?

Also, what font are you using?

[Bobby Henderson · Accepted solution]

Typefaces that contain true small capital character sets will have those characters correspond to lowercase letters. First you need to type out the word "WILSON" in mixed case rather than all capitals. With "Wilson" selected, go into the Character palette and select the "Tt" icon for small capitals and apply it. If the type object is in all capitals the small caps function will have no effect on the type object.

The small capitals button will technically work on fonts that don't have a true, native small caps character set, but the results will basically be faked. It just takes uppercase characters and shrinks them to about 75% of their normal size (the results of which often look pretty lousy).

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Also, some fonts are in uppercase only.

[JamieNHW]

Thanks, Bobby,

Brilliant! I chose another font as once I got the small capitals to work the font was just being shrunk and so the weight was off terribly! I appreciate your advice, have a great day!

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm a big fan of typefaces that include extras like true small capitals. If you haven't already been doing so, you can open the Glyphs palette to see if a given typeface has true small capitals (among other features).