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Inspiring
September 20, 2021
Question

Fonts' OpenType features not working in Composite fonts in InDesign

  • September 20, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 1306 views

When using any Hebrew font in InDesign, the diacritics (nikuds) are displayed in their correct location. This location is set within the fonts by using OpenType features such as ccmp (for glyph substitution) and mark (for glyph positioning). InDesign recognizes and applies these features.

The resulting text looks like that:

I put two guides to the right to indicate the end of text.

When this font is used as part of a Composite font in InDesign, the result is quite different. It seems like the ccmp feature is honored but the mark feature is not. (The first [last for non-Israelis] character on the first line is controlled with a ccmp feature to combine two characters.)

Here is how the composite font looks:

Notice how the diacritics shift and the length of the text increases. Some of this fluctuation can be mitigated by Diacritics Position feature in InDesign however this feature only works on a paragraph level and applies the correction to ALL diacritics uniformly whereas the whole point of the OpenType feature is to adjust diacritics on a character level.

Has anyone run into this problem and if so, is there something that can be done within the font or within InDesign to correct that (besides reporting it to Adobe who "will fix it in the next release")?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

A2D2
Inspiring
September 20, 2024

I am getting a similar problem, but using an Arabic font (Adobe Naskh) ... but I am not using a composite font

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/language-support-adobe-naskh-arabic-support-diacritic-positioning-ligatures/m-p/14867162#M589515

 

 

Inspiring
September 23, 2021

Composite fonts have never worked properly since they were introduced in the ME version in CS6. It's a pity as they would be very useful.

Inspiring
September 24, 2021

Hm... so no real solution then?

Inspiring
September 24, 2021

Not as far as I know. In our experience, mostly with Arabic, composite fonts work better if the Arabic font does not contain Roman characters. But as that's not really a solution, we usually end up using Grep styles.