Is there a way to force LaTeX to automatically use small-caps for abbreviations and acronyms (or more specifically, strings of two or more uppercase letters)?
[Tex/LaTex] Can small-caps be automated for abbreviations and acronyms
acronymsautomationsmall-caps
Related Solutions
Not really a compelling rationale, but I would go with method 2 because that's what The Economist does:
(The Economist, November 6th 2010)
A good rule of thumb for scaling uppercase to match (poorly) small caps is to use a factor 0.8 of the font size.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{xspace}
\makeatletter
\DeclareRobustCommand{\maybefakesc}[1]{%
\ifnum\pdfstrcmp{\f@series}{\bfdefault}=\z@
{\fontsize{\dimexpr0.8\dimexpr\f@size pt\relax}{0}\selectfont\uppercase{#1}}%
\else
\textsc{#1}%
\fi
}
\newcommand\AM{\,\maybefakesc{am}\xspace}
\newcommand\PM{\,\maybefakesc{pm}\xspace}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
{\bfseries 5:00\AM to 8:00\AM}
5:00\AM to 8:00\AM
\textbf{\AM}\AM
\Huge\textbf{\AM}\AM
\end{document}
Notice that your test of a following period is useless if you adopt \xspace.
It may seem too high, when compared side by side, but boldface always has some overshoot. Refine at will.
Note. If the text you pass to \maybefakesc can be more complicated than a simple string of ASCII characters, change \uppercase into \MakeUppercase.
Best Answer
I think it's difficult to implement such macros. However, we can do it with help from some preprocess. It easy to write a script to do this. For example, an one-line script of
sed:You may modify it as your wish.
On windows platform
sedhave to be installed manually, from GNUWin32 or MingW. Just write a batch file and configure the editor to call it.