Upper and lower case (LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual (November 2018))

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### 23.2 Upper and lower case

Synopsis:

    \uppercase{text}
    \lowercase{text}
    \MakeUppercase{text}
    \MakeLowercase{text}

Change the case of characters. The TeX primitives commands `\uppercase` and `\lowercase` only work for American characters. The LaTeX commands `\MakeUppercase` and `\MakeLowercase` commands also change characters accessed by commands such as `\ae` or `\aa`. The commands `\MakeUppercase` and `\MakeLowercase` are robust but they have moving arguments (see \protect).

These commands do not change the case of letters used in the name of a command within text. But they do change the case of every other Latin letter inside the argument text. Thus, `\MakeUppercase{Let $y=f(x)$`} produces ‘`LET Y=F(X)`’. Another example is that the name of an environment will be changed, so that `\MakeUppercase{\begin{tabular} ... \end{tabular}}` will produce an error because the first half is changed to `\begin{TABULAR}`.

LaTeX uses the same fixed table for changing case throughout a document, The table used is designed for the font encoding T1; this works well with the standard TeX fonts for all Latin alphabets but will cause problems when using other alphabets.

To change the case of text that results from a macro inside text you need to do expansion. Here the `\Schoolname` produces ‘`COLLEGE OF MATHEMATICS`’.

    \newcommand{\schoolname}{College of Mathematics}
    \newcommand{\Schoolname}{\expandafter\MakeUppercase
                               \expandafter{\schoolname}}

The `textcase` package brings some of the missing feature of the standard LaTeX commands `\MakeUppercase` and `\MakeLowerCase`.

To uppercase only the first letter of words, you can use the package `mfirstuc`.

Unofficial LaTeX2e reference manual