[Tex/LaTex] How to change the font for biblatex acronyms

acronymsbiblatexfontssmall-caps

I have a bibliography in biblatex and I want to use different fonts than Computer Modern, namely Lato & Bitstream Charter. Here is a minimal example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[defaultsans, scale=0.9]{lato}
\usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{references.bib}
@article{
  shannon,
  author = {Shannon, C. E.},
  title = {A mathematical theory of communication},
  journal = {SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev.},
  issue_date = {January 2001},
  volume = {5},
  number = {1},
  month = jan,
  year = {2001},
  issn = {1559-1662},
  pages = {3--55},
  numpages = {53},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/584091.584093},
  doi = {10.1145/584091.584093},
  acmid = {584093},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=alphabetic,natbib=true]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{references.bib}

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}
\printbibliography

\end{document}

This results in the following output after running biber and pdflatex:

example

The red arrows indicate my problem: Because Bitstream Charter has no actual small caps, LaTeX simply shrinks the characters for acronyms like ISSN and I don't like how this looks. So my question is: How can I change the font such that acronyms are simply displayed regularly?

Best Answer

You need to change the macro \mkbibacro. Its original definition is

\newcommand*{\mkbibacro}[1]{%
  \ifcsundef{\f@encoding/\f@family/\f@series/sc}
    {#1}
    {\textsc{\MakeLowercase{#1}}}}

so a somewhat brute-force approach (replacing small caps with "typeset as-is" (here: capitals) for all fonts) would be

\renewcommand*{\mkbibacro}[1]{#1}

A better way is to trick biblatex into thinking that Mathdesign/Bitstream Charter doesn't feature small caps. Add the following to your preamble:

\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{\mkbibacro}[1]{%
  \csundef{\f@encoding/mdbch/\f@series/sc}%
  \ifcsundef{\f@encoding/\f@family/\f@series/sc}
    {#1}
    {\textsc{\MakeLowercase{#1}}}}
\makeatother

enter image description here

Note: The "font shorthand" mdbch for Mathdesign/Bitstream Charter can be detected by adding \show\rmdefault to the OP's example.

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