Biblical Cantillation Symbols (trope) in InDesign

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
June 8, 2021
5 replies
4025 views

Does anyone have advice for pasting Hebrew Biblical text with cantillation marks into InDesign? We have the Middle Eastern version, and all of the regular Hebrew works beautifully, but the font doesn't seem to recognize cantillation symbols. Changing the font has only been a kerning disaster. Thanks very much!

Type

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L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi together,

maybe this InDesign script by Roland Dreger can help?

OpenType features Dialog

Roland says: The idea behind this script is to test the OpenType features of an installed font in InDesign - without flyouts, dropdowns, and the like.

https://github.com/RolandDreger/open-type-features#readme

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

K

kennyr34495207

Known Participant

Is there a tutorial to using this? It seems complicated.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi @kennyr34495207 ,

the terminology of OpenType font features might be the biggest hurdle. Especially for me because I have to deal with that in German with my German InDesign.

I see that Roland posted some links to videos at Vimeo.

Look into the GitHub README.md

All in all the matter is complicated.

I can only link to Microsoft's OpenType list of features and respective discriptions that is very extensive:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/featurelist

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/features_ae

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

K

kennyr34495207

Known Participant

I have fonts that use cantilation marks, and have been trying to make it work, but when there is more than one mark per character, Indesign just doesn't know how to handle it. The marks move to weird places. Its not a font issue, because Microsoft Word knows how to handle it correctly with the same exact text and the same exact font. Any suggestions?

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Font rendering in Word works rather differently than the way it works in InDesign. I'd suggest that you do what Uwe and Ariel have already suggested;

1) Can you post a screenshot of improperly rendered cantilation marks? Preferably with hidden characters visible and the Story Editor also visible, as Uwe suggested.

2) Likewise, have you tried it with the SBL Hebrew fonts posted by Ariel?

I also wonder if you'd tried it with both the Paragraph Composer and the World-Ready Composer.

K

kennyr34495207

Known Participant

I've been using world ready composer.

I tried the SBL font.

word processes it differently, and therefore what? Word seems to get it right.

I actually figured out how to manually adjust them but that's a huge project for a book, to change each specific one. The program should really display them correctly.

What else do you suggest?