Applying "No Language" changes font

Question

I'm setting English text in Scala Pro, which has a Stylistic Set that makes the "1" look like a "1" rather than the default "I" for Old Style Figures. So far so good. But, if you change the hyphenation to "No Language", like you would when setting URLs, the number "1"s change back to "I"s. Is there a reason for this? Seems like a bug, no?

JamieMcKee · Accepted Answer

ID-Extra's Hyperlink Pro, which breaks the URLs for me through a combination of adding discretionary line breaks throughout the URL, as well as setting the Language (which controls Hyphenation) to "No Language"

I'm sure that Ariel had a good reason for doing it that way, but I personally think it's wrong. If there is any chance that it will go through a screenreader (literally any PDF, these days), it should have a Language applied, so that it can be read aloud. Automating discretionary line breaks (or ZWSP or whatever) is a great idea, though. Not going to @ Ariel to bug him about it, though.

My own method relies on manual glyph insertion to break URLs by hand upon review, but once again, that might not work for you, just as it doesn't work for me when I'm doing something high-volume with multiple target formats. In those cases, I use the method that Willi is posting about, including carefully grooming one's GREP query that applies the No Break character style, excluding specific glyphs where you'd want it to break.

But regardless of all that, I contend that setting the Language to No Language should not change the glyph. Are there reasons it should?

I'd say so, although I don't have any justification whatsoever for this behavior in this particular font. For instance, if I'm working in a Devanagari font, there are glyphs that have the same Unicode ID that render differently, sometimes with radically different glyph shaping, when marked as Hindi vs Marathi vs Nepali. This is a totally normal feature of the OpenType featureset. So the idea that language settings in the app should have the ability to modify glyph shapes is to me an obvious Of Course They Should Be Able To.

But when I go to Adobe Fonts and install Scala Pro myself, I don't think that my install and my font are behaving the way you describe. I find that, when I have no stylistic sets turned on, the "Default Figure Style" as well as both Proportional and Tabular Oldstyle cause the numeral 1 to be substituted with that oldstyle smallcaps-I-lookin' glyph (hereinafter "oldstyle 1"). The only case where Stylistic Sets alter my numeral 1 is when I have either default or oldstyle numerals applied - meaning that the oldstyle 1 is displayed - and turn on Stylistic Set 1, which replaces it with an oldstyle halfheight proportional numeral. It looks weird when I've overtly selected Tabular Oldstyle figures, and the stylistic set replaces my numeral ones with numerals that are half-height, but are proportional instead of tablular.

I cannot get the language setting to affect these numerals at all.

Can you maybe post some step by step instructions so I can try to reproduce your issue? No matter my choices in numeral style or in stylistic set, changing the applied language changes nothing in the text. This makes me wonder if we're using the same version of the font, if we're using the same version of InDesign. I'm testing version 8 from Adobe Fonts on InDesign 19.5.4.

Oooh, Joel...fascinating. So I was using a version of Scala provided to me by the publisher, which according to my font manager (FontAgent Pro) is version 7.504 from 2005. But when I disable it and instead use Scala Pro from Adobe fonts, the issue goes away. If there's a way to tell the version of the font used when using Adobe fonts, I don't know what it is...can't tell from either the Creative Cloud app or on the Adobe fonts website, but I'm guessing it was a bug in an older version of Scala, which I was using, and has since been corrected.

Thanks all for you engagement on the issue!

Joel Cherney · Answer

But, if you change the hyphenation to "No Language",

Hyphenation is a setting that you can turn on and off. It's a paragraph-wide setting, which you can find in the Paragraph Style, or in the flyout menu of the Paragraph Panel. Language is a character setting, that you can set in a Character Style, or a Paragraph Style, or locally with the language dropdown in the Character panel, or in the Tools panel, or probably five other spaces. Point being is that there are different settings for "is hyphenation on or off?" and "what language is this?" and you're misusing the Language dropdown when, if you want to turn off hyphenation, there's a setting that controls that.

But! What if you want all of the paragrpah to hyphenate, except for the URL? One strategy is to do exactly what Willi suggests - you make a Character Style that has the No Break property turned on. Willi's method is a good one - to have No Break apply to particular kinds of glyphs, the ones where your URL would break, and apply them throughout the document with a GREP Style. That's not my personal method - I prefer to have a URL Character Style, just like InDesign does by default when you're defining a new URL, and add the No Break setting to the entire URL. That way, anytime my URL doesn't fit in my text frame, it shows as an overset, and I can eyeball it and decide myself where to let the line break happen. I typically use Willi's method when I know I'm facing a long document with a large number of links, so many that automating the process would be a better use of my time than than making three thousand careful decisions about exactly where I want my URL to break.

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