Accent Character Woes

[Earnest Hart]

How do I place an Accent Character directly above let's say the letter "a." 

I have to do a poster in the Choctaw language and need a couple of accents (right-leaning slash) above a couple of the characters in the middle of the word. The placement of the accent is important as it's needed for pronouncing the word in the Choctaw language.

I can get the accent haracter inserted in Glyphs, but InDesign places it between two adjacent characters and not directly where it needs to be above the character that's selected So I tried to use a kerning method, which caused erratic spacing between the characters and just doesn't look right to me. 

What am I missing?

In all my years of InDesign work, I've somehow never had to deal with many accent characters. Lucky, I guess. Thanks for any help.

Earnest

[David Popham · Accepted solution]

Hi Earnest,

Go to Type > Glyphs to open the Glyphs panel. There you'll find all of the glyph characters available for the font you're using. Make sure that it's showing Entire Font. Place your cursor in the text, and when you find the character you want in the Glyph panel, double-click to add it to the text.

[Earnest Hart]

Maybe I was not showing the Entire Font list, as I don't recall seeing all the other character options available. I only saw the top row. I'll try again on Tuesday morning once back in the office. 

Thanks for your help. 

Earnest

[Migintosh]

Based only on the one font I found, it looks like there are some other characters besides accented Roman characters, so you may want to use a custom font. I'm not sure if it's OK to post the link here, but if it's not, I'm sure the moderators will remove it, but I found it with a simple Google search for Choctaw Language Font.

https://www.linguistsoftware.com/lchoctaw.htm

[Earnest Hart]

Hello, I was able to look at the link and the "LaserChoctaw font seems to be exactly what I need, as the following example would certainly solve my problem, where ": + a ="  (the accent above the a). And "; + a =" the other accent below the character I would need, 

But I assume the Adobe fonts I can activate with InDesign 2020 won't include LaserChoctaw and I'll have to purchase it, The latter will be interesting since I work in the state government sector and shouldn't use my own money. 

Thanks for your reply. Very insightful.

Earnest

[David Popham · Accepted solution]

If you need vowels with the macron below the vowel characters, that seems to be one of the few fonts, if not the only one, with those characters. Minion Pro has one of the more extensive sets of glyph characters in Adobe's font library, but it doesn't have those.

With regard to using the Glyphs panel, I should have added that you need to make sure that you have chosen a font in the field at the bottom of the panel. Otherwise, you'll only see recently used glyphs. You can also use the search field (the one with the magnifying glass icon) to narrow down the characters that are shown in the panel. For example, if you're looking for an "a" with an accent, type "a" in the search field.

Additionally, you can create custom glyph sets to give you quicker access to characters that you frequently use. Visit Adobe's help site on the topic for more information.