Library of Formatting Examples:Small Caps/06A
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Correctly-formatted text
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<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: 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 uppercase instead of "squat" small caps. Marking them separately avoids this, and lets us use the normal uppercase "A. M." Alternatively, using one pair of tags and lowercase "a. m." will give the desired result in HTML, but that's not how we usually format small caps "a. m." and when possible, we strive for consistency. (Both ways work equally well for plain text.)
As seen later in the example, this book does not use small caps for am/pm within the text.