Community Expert

Question

Find open type fractions or text that is using fractions as a single character

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 18, 2022
4 replies
1089 views

I have a word file with 1/4 - 1/2 etc. but some say 1/6.

When I import this to InDesign the 1/4 and 1/2 are fine as the glyph exists in that font.

But the 1/6 is missing - and it's quite difficult to find all of them.

There may be more.

How can I find these characters for all possibilities in either Word or InDesign?

Any ideas?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi Eugene:

Another option is to design a GREP style that will find numbers that appear both before and after a forward slash, and convert them to fractions automatically. This is an old post, but it still works the same way.

https://www.rockymountaintraining.com/adobe-indesign-cs4cs5-got-fractions/

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

E

Eugene Tyson

Author

Community Expert

Thanks Barb, I'll look into this on Monday. Looks like it might work.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

But you said above the missing fractions are single glyphs...

And this is still subject to the risk of formatting dates as fractions (and if there is no word break included in the GREP possibly sending ID into a tizzy when it encounters a date like 2/19/2022) or formatting the interger part of a number like two and one half as part of the numerator.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi Eugene,

you could find all missing glyphs with a script by Peter Kahrel written after an idea by Peter Baumgartner:

Manage missing glyphs (CS4 and later)
Peter Kahrel
25 Nov. 2019: Added the possibility to apply a character style to any missing glyphs.

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/missing_glyphs.html

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

E

Eugene Tyson

Author

Community Expert

Very good, I should be able to find them using this method.

Anyway to convert them to text once found?

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Oh, Hi Eugene. Just realized you were the OP. Didn't mean to talk down to you.

E

Eugene Tyson

Author

Community Expert

No worries. I don't know if there might be a GREP to find open type fractions or similar.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Sure. .+ and set the find format to OTF Fractions under OpenType Features in the Find Format dialog.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

A simple Find/Change (Text tab) should find them if you are looking for a specific fraction. On the GREP tab \d+\/\d+ should find any combination of digits separated by a slash.

Either one is going to find already formatted text as well as unformatted and some extraneous matches like dates if they exist, and I can't think of a way off the top of my head to change the formatting in one go.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

You can limit the hits to just text to which Opentype Fractions has been applied to remove false positives like dates, but thast still won't make a formatting change automatically. To do that you need to work in two steps, find numerators and make them numerators, then find denominators and change them. The though that something would be incorrectly changed is still so scary to me that I would still run any query one hit at a time rather than clicking Change All.

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