In reply to Fonts with mid-caps?:
Just as a point of clarification, what I'm talking about is scaling the existing small caps up a bit, not "faking" them from full caps. Of course, TeX will let you do this as well.
BTW, there have been several threads in Typophile on how to make "true-cut" small caps from the full caps. Its been a number of years since I used TeX -- and we used plain TeX with our own macros -- but the main reason to go to a font editing program is to be able to control the weight. Couldn't do that with the old TeX, or any layout program I know of. Just a matter of time, I imagine.
In a font editing program, scale down the full caps, non-proportionally. When starting with full caps, my starting point is to scale down 4 percent less horizontally than vertically. Of course, you have to look at the result & adjust as necessary. Then increase the weight. The other reason to use a font editing program is to handle the little touches that let you create really "true-cut" small and/or petite and/or mid caps. Serifs, and the round letters...
Edit:
The other thing to watch for is the x-height not be generally too large. If it is large, there isn't much room for distinct petite caps. I was thinking of Charis, which we've modified successfully for our work, but the x-height is quite large. Petite caps could be done, but would be a bit tricky.
Open Source fonts like Charis are of course modifiable, and those modifications can be distributed. At 11:00pm at home, I can't remember just which Gyre fonts are actually good ... Sadly, I find most rather lacking. IIRC, Pagella isn't too bad, if you can stand a Palatino.