Biblical Cantillation Symbols (trope) in InDesign

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
June 8, 2021
5 replies
4026 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.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Thanks! I would love to see the update and where you post it!

hopefully it yields something.

Have you tried Window -> Type -> Diacritic Adjustment? Selecting "OpenType (adjustment from base character)" looks like it mimics the positioning of diacritics in Word almost perfectly. What I've done is this: I've made & attached an InDesign file with three layers. One layer is your live text (colored red), another layer is your text with OT diacritic adjustment turned on (green), and the third is a PDF I made from Word (black). By turning layer visibility on and off, I can clearly see where diacritics are not displaying correctly (or, in fact, not displaying at all).

Can you take a look at this and maybe identify which fonts, if any, are actually rendering correctly in ID? (I will also go and install the latest version, so that we can see if this was induced in the most recent update to 17.0.)

Hebrew_Diacritics_Aligned.pdf

Hebrew_Diacritics_Not_Aligned_converted.zip