capitalizationsmall-caps
Is it possible to force text into lower case small caps without making capital letters lower case?
None of the following makes all the letters lower case small caps:
\textsc{Can I make this line only small caps?}
\scshape{Can I make this line only small caps?}
To get all small caps one needs to format it manually to lower case:
\textsc{can i make this line only small caps?}
Update:
As @barbarabeeton has pointed out \scis deprecated so I have removed that example.
Not really a compelling rationale, but I would go with method 2 because that's what The Economist does:
(The Economist, November 6th 2010)
Even among commercial fonts, few have small cap figures and punctuation marks, but the following do, and I’ve used them successfully with luatex and xetex: Augustin, Cartier Book Pro, Jannon 10 Pro, and Neacademia Latin. In the case of Jannon 10 Pro, you have to specify Script=Default in your invocation of fontspec for the feature to work.
Here is a demonstration, from which you can see that Neacademia and Cartier have small cap figures whose ascending and descending parts are tucked in more (Cartier) or less (Neacademia), while the small cap figures in Jannon and Augustin are lining.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Contextuals=Alternate]{Neacademia Latin}
\newfontfamily\jannon[
Script=Default,
Contextuals=Inner,
Numbers=OldStyle,
ItalicFeatures={Contextuals={WordInitial,WordFinal}}
]{Jannon 10 Pro}
\newfontfamily\augustin[
BoldFont={Augustin Bold},
BoldItalicFont={Augustin Bold Italic},
BoldFeatures={SmallCapsFont={Augustin Bold Small Caps}},
ItalicFont={Augustin Italic},
SmallCapsFont={Augustin Small Caps}
]{Augustin-Regular}
\newfontfamily\cartier[BoldFont={* Medium}]{Cartier Book Pro}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{rl}
Neacademia Latin & George Orwell, 1984?! \textsc{george orwell, 1984?!}\\
\jannon Jannon 10 Pro & \jannon George Orwell, 1984?! \textsc{george orwell, 1984?!}\\
\cartier Cartier Book Pro & \cartier George Orwell, 1984?! \textsc{george orwell, 1984?!}\\
\augustin Augustin & \augustin George Orwell, 1984?! \textsc{george orwell, 1984?!}
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
Best Answer
Another option would be to use
\MakeTextLowercasefrom thetextcasepackage: