Small Capitals
Surprisingly few typefaces now come with true small capitals. On a full (2GB) installation of tex-live,
gives me (simplified return, typeset in LibreOffice):
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After weeding out the sans serif-fonts and those that are clearly too playful to be used in academic documents, I am left with the following shortlist:
| typeface | remarks | thesis page count |
| Linux Biolinum O | funny yogh, overly wide footnote numbers | 287 |
| Linux Libertine O | funny yogh, overly wide footnote numbers | 286 |
| TeX Gyre Pagella, Schola, Termes | just a little playful; no yogh! | 304, 318, 282 |
| Junicode | lacks uppercase italic dotted s | 274 |
All the otf files came with tex-live; I installed Junicode myself. Biolinum and Libertine have the best character set (covering everything I need except the runes) and are quite pretty, but their footnote anchors take up too much horizontal space and the frivolous shape of their yogh would certainly raise a few eyebrows. The TeX Gyre fonts are very handsome, although two of them take up way too much space. Termes is the best-looking of these, however, and it is entirely spatially reasonable. But all TeX Gyre fonts are off the table since they do not contain the rudimentary Middle English yogh character.
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Libertine looks just a little too round to be used in scholarship, and those footnote anchors really bother me as I have up to 300 notes per chapter. I have printed the defence text of my thesis in Junicode, but the one instance of an uppercase italic dotted s in Libertine.