Library of Formatting Examples:Small Caps/06A

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Correctly formatted text

<sc>Wednesday, July 20</sc>, <sc>A. M.</sc>--Begins calm with
thick fogs. 5.30 a. m., fog cleared off, went ahead full
speed. Jam of ice to the N. E., steamed more to the
westward following the leads northward, light breeze
from E. N. E. 6.30 a. m., fine open water, making
straight course. 10.45 a.m., very heavy sheets, having to
steam around them from N. W. to east, but making good

A.M. and P.M.

How should this small-caps text be formatted? Most of the Post-Processors who discussed it prefer using two pairs of small-caps tags, as shown below: one for the entire date and the other for "A. M." WHY: if everything to the left of the em-dash is in one pair of markups, the HTML version of "A. M." will become actual upper-case instead of "squat" small-caps. Marking them separately avoids this, and lets us use the normal upper-case "A. M." Alternatively, using one pair of tags and lower-case "a. m." will give the desired result in HTML, but that's not how we format small-caps "A. M." and when possible, we strive for consistency. (Both ways work equally well for Plain Text.) this book does not use small-caps for am/pm within the text