Archive for April, 2018

Removing “small caps” from a Google Docs document

Wednesday, April 4th, 2018

If you’ve battled with documents imported to Google Docs, you’ve probably come across a document which features formatting that is shown, but is not editable in Google Docs. A typical example is “small caps” – that typographic style where all letters are transformed into capitals, but actual capital letters looks bigger. Like this, if you take the sentence “This Is Small Caps”:

This Is Small Caps

Probably wisely, Google Docs doesn’t support this. However, because it doesn’t, getting rid of it is tricky if it’s embedded in a style (let’s say a Heading 1). Clearing formatting doesn’t work. However, I’ve found the solution (which also doesn’t require any add-ons):

  1. Create some plain (non-small caps) text
  2. Copy that text (Ctrl-C)
  3. Paste it into the middle of an example of the offending small caps text (Ctrl-V). The pasted text should retain its non small-caps style, but will still be classed as being Heading 1 text
  4. Make sure your cursor is in the non-small caps text you just pasted
  5. Right click -> “Update ‘Heading 1’ to match”. Bingo!