Accessing Stylistic Alternates via Character Style

[bemboozled]

I'm trying to figure out how to get InDesign to access stylistic alternates in a specific font (Bembo Book MT Pro in my case). I want to update an .indt file so that any books laid out using the template (with paragraph/character styles, etc.) in the future will have the short-tailed R swapped in instead of the long-tailed R that ships with the font by default. Does anyone have any ideas, beyond using Find/Change with glyph ids? I'm looking for a way to "set it and forget it" in a template file, rather than always have a Find/Change (or script) that needs to be performed as a subsequent step after a book has been typeset.

I don't know why Monotype ships the long-tailed R as the default and doesn't even enable the short-tailed one in a stylistic set... or why InDesign seems to have stopped exposing salt via the GUI. Seems like many people must have this issue. I'm not sure I can shell out for Monotype to create a custom font modification, and the font license indicates pretty clearly that no modifications are allowed.

[Joel Cherney]

Not sure why the expected character style solution doesn't work for you. More confusing to me is why it works in the paragraph style, but it won't work in the preview of the paragraph style. I checked the Preview box in the paragraph style, but the glyph wouldn't change until I'd whacked OK and left the paragraph style options.

Fortunately it does work as it ought in the character style.  Here it is working for me, in the character style, in 20.5.0 on Win10:

I suppose that one could make a GREP Style in the Paragraph style, that only applied this character style to the capital R? 

[bemboozled]

Huh! I don't seem to have the option available that you have in my Character Styles > OpenType features (or in Paragraph Styles, either), I wonder if it's a Windows/Mac difference? I'm on 20.5 (claims to be the latest version) on Mac OS 15.6. But I'm missing "stylistic alternates" along with the other three options in that row.

It's reassuring to know that at least some people have this option... maybe I can ask Adobe why I don't...

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

Huh! I don't seem to have the option available that you have in my Character Styles > OpenType features (or in Paragraph Styles, either), I wonder if it's a Windows/Mac difference?

Weird! I suspect that it's actually a difference between your English InDesign (or whatever locale you're working in) and my "Middle East/North Africa" installation of InDesign that has controls for handling right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew. "Stretched Alternate" and "Overlap Swash" are both Arabic-specific settings, but I can't tell you why Stylistic Alternate is treated as being a RTL-specific setting. Probably it was a strictly Arabic setting back in the CS3 era when it was added to InDesign, and hasn't been ported over to the Western European locales. 

At any rate, while your ostensibly English locale doesn't have the tools in the UI, your installation does support using stylistic alternates. You could write some Javascript that would turn the setting on and off on your text, or in your paragraph or character styles. But if you don't feel like writing JS to access these features, then it's easy to access them in other ways. I've attached an InDesign document to this post, and in that document there are paragraph and character styles that have the Stylistic Alternate box checked. So you could download that INDD, and then harvest the styles from it by using the flyout menu of the Paragraph Styles or Character Styles panel and choosing "Load All Text Styles" (or just "Load Paragraph Styles" or "Load Character Styles") and import styles from my INDD into your own. 

[Peter Spier]

Huh! I don't seem to have the option available that you have in my Character Styles > OpenType features (or in Paragraph Styles, either), I wonder if it's a Windows/Mac difference?

Weird! I suspect that it's actually a difference between your English InDesign (or whatever locale you're working in) and my "Middle East/North Africa" installation of InDesign that has controls for handling right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew.

By @Joel Cherney

Looks like that's the case. I don't see the option in my US English install on Windows either...

[bemboozled]

Amazing!! Thank you so much, Joel. Not only were you exactly right (I'm sure I have an English/Western/North American region/locale set up) but I so appreciate you sharing an .indd with the setting I can't access in my GUI. That did the trick for me. Brilliant workaround!

[EduardoMoura]

You could try using one of the Stylistic Sets in the Character Styles dialogue to enable this specific feature in your font. That will probably do the trick.