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Letters in small caps (\scshape) are larger (height and width) than lower case letters. How can you make them the same size?

Minimal example: 

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Default: \textsc{a}a, \textsc{b}b, \textsc{c}c \dots
Solution should look more like this: \textsc{\footnotesize a}a, 
  \textsc{\footnotesize b}b, \textsc{\footnotesize c}c \dots
\end{document}
Randy Randerson
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    Isn't this exactly the purpose of small caps??? -- to have a greater height than the lower case letters? ;-) –  Feb 07 '16 at 22:08
  • I think it looks better if they are the same size. Some older books are typeset that way. – Randy Randerson Feb 07 '16 at 22:09
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    Mixing them does not look nice anyway -- is there any reason you want to have them this way? –  Feb 07 '16 at 22:11
  • I'm using scshape for theorem headings, and I don't want the size of the lower case letters to change in the middle of a paragraph. – Randy Randerson Feb 07 '16 at 22:12
  • I also don't think this is a good idea. But you can easily adapt one of the solutions in http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/55664/fake-small-caps-with-xetex-fontspec/64584#64584 to achieve what you want. – Benjamin Feb 07 '16 at 22:41
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    Easily done with fontspec. But why not use a font designed in such a way that the small caps are to your liking. 'Faking' font sizes usually looks obvious and not in a good way. – jon Feb 07 '16 at 22:50
  • Fake small-caps look especially bad this way which is why fontinst does not match fake small-caps to the size of loawercase. (I think it uses 80% of uppercase height, but might be misremembering.) – cfr Feb 08 '16 at 02:12
  • Note also: the size of the lowercase letters does not change. Small-caps are not lowercase letters. But, really, if you prefer small-caps of similar size, just use a font which is designed that way. – cfr Feb 08 '16 at 02:16

1 Answers1

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It would be much better to choose a font designed to your liking. Obviously, this depends on more than just the size of small-caps, but here's one example,

\usepackage{kpfonts}

kpfonts small-caps and lowercase

Note that no font will make them the same width since the shapes of upper and lowercase letters differ and, hence, so do those of small-caps and lowercase. But I assume you can't really want small-caps i to be the same width as lowercase i....

cfr
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