True small caps are a separate weight of the font with the lower case letters as small versions of the capital letters, and are designed to look well set against the true capitals e.g. the vertical strokes are a similar thickness.
When you use your software to 'fake' small caps by setting upper and lower case text and then selecting the 'small caps' option you can get a pretty ugly result depending on which font you use.
See how different the letters look side by side compared to the example above?
Unfortunately not all fonts include a small caps weight, so what to do then? Well in some cases the result won't look too bad and a little tweaking of the advanced type preferences (where small caps are typically set to something like 70% actual size) either up or down in size can help.
Alternatively you could 'fudge' it by setting the small caps in a slightly heavier weight of the font than the caps themselves. In this example the caps are set in Quadraat Regular but the small caps are set in Quadraat Bold.
Its not perfect but it definitely easier on the eye than the software's attempt above.
