- Law 18, Set Acronyms and Initialisms in Small Caps.
Acronyms are abbreviations formed
from the initial letters of other words,
and acronyms are pronounced as words.
Initialisms are also abbreviations that are formed
from the initial letters of other words,
but initialisms are not pronounced as words.
They're pronounced as separate letters.
Examples of acronyms are NASA, which stands for
National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code
for Information Interchange, NATO, which stands for
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and ASAP
which stands for as soon as possible.
And you can see we took the first letter
of each of these words and strung it together
to form an abbreviation which we pronounce as a word.
Examples of initialisms are CIA, which stands for
Central Intelligence Agency, and here,
instead of reading CIA as a word,
we pronounce each separate letter,
and that's what makes this an initialism.
FBI, which stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation,
AM, which stands for ante meridiem,
and PM, which stands for post meridiem.
In body text, you'll often see acronyms and initialisms
set in all caps or all upper case letters,
and usually they look like this,
and notice how these abbreviations that are set in all caps
overpower the other body text on the page.
These abbreviations look so huge
and a little bit out of place.
So, you should avoid using all caps
in professional documents for this reason.
Text that is set in all caps is really
too heavy on the page, and it looks out of scale
compared to the rest of the body text
that's going to be set in mostly lower case letters.
So then, what do you do with acronyms and initialisms?
What is the proper way
to treat these things typographically?
You should set them using small caps,
and what are small caps?
Small caps are upper case characters
that are drawn at a lower case scale.
Small cap characters are about the same height
as a typeface's x-height, but they're capital letters.
Here's an example of the same body text as before,
but this time our abbreviations,
our acronyms and our initialisms,
have been set in small caps, rather than in all caps,
like they were before, and notice how in our second example
these abbreviations look so much nicer,
and they really integrate better
with the rest of the body text on the page
and in the paragraph.
Acronyms and initialisms also look best
with some letter spacing or a little extra space
added between each letter.
Here's an example of the same text from earlier,
that contains our abbreviations,
and now they're set in small caps,
and we've also added just a little bit of letter spacing,
or a little bit of horizontal space between each letter.
Although acronyms and initialisms are abbreviations,
they do not need periods included after each letter.
Including these periods adds unnecessary visual clutter
to the abbreviations, and your pages are going to look
a lot cleaner without all that extra punctuation.
The meaning is still clear.
Readability is not sacrificed
without this extra punctuation.
If you're going to be using a lot of small caps
in your document, you want to choose a type family
that includes a small caps typeface.
Small caps typefaces have been specifically created
and drawn to visually integrate with other text on your page
and to look really good while doing it.
Let's summarize.
Pay attention to acronyms and initialisms in your documents.
You should set them using small caps.
Properly typesetting these abbreviations
will go a long way toward making your pages
look professional and aesthetically pleasing.
That's Law 18, Set Acronyms and initialisms in Small Caps.