Fonts' OpenType features not working in Composite fonts in InDesign

[biozaichenko]

When using any Hebrew font in InDesign, the diacritics (nikuds) are displayed in their correct location. This location is set within the fonts by using OpenType features such as ccmp (for glyph substitution) and mark (for glyph positioning). InDesign recognizes and applies these features.

The resulting text looks like that:

I put two guides to the right to indicate the end of text.

When this font is used as part of a Composite font in InDesign, the result is quite different. It seems like the ccmp feature is honored but the mark feature is not. (The first [last for non-Israelis] character on the first line is controlled with a ccmp feature to combine two characters.)

Here is how the composite font looks:

Notice how the diacritics shift and the length of the text increases. Some of this fluctuation can be mitigated by Diacritics Position feature in InDesign however this feature only works on a paragraph level and applies the correction to ALL diacritics uniformly whereas the whole point of the OpenType feature is to adjust diacritics on a character level.

Has anyone run into this problem and if so, is there something that can be done within the font or within InDesign to correct that (besides reporting it to Adobe who "will fix it in the next release")?

[Peter Leverage]

Composite fonts have never worked properly since they were introduced in the ME version in CS6. It's a pity as they would be very useful.

[biozaichenko]

Hm... so no real solution then?

[Peter Leverage]

Not as far as I know. In our experience, mostly with Arabic, composite fonts work better if the Arabic font does not contain Roman characters. But as that's not really a solution, we usually end up using Grep styles.

[Joel Cherney]

Same here. I find that I use composite fonts when working with East Asian languages, but when working with RTL languages (or really any other complex script) that I experience fewer issues if I simply avoid composite fonts completely. 

As far as fixing it "within the font" goes, I certainly have someone's homebrew Hebrew OT font lying around somewhere with the PUA chock full of glyphs that were slightly repositioned nikud obviously designed for resolving this issue by doing contexual alternate lookups. It was a buggy font and obviously experimental, but I suspect that some abuse of the OT format could contitute "something that can be done within the font."

However, I think that you've found a legit bug, and even if you don't have time to wait for it to be fixed, I think that reporting it at indesign.uservoice.com is probably the best way forward. I may well go do it myself if I have the spare time today; it looks like an issue that is depressingly easy to replicate. 

[Peter Leverage]

Well, one lives in hope. I remember reporting this in CS6, and I forget how long ago that was now...

[Joel Cherney]

Yeah, back in the CS days bug reporting felt kind of like dropping messages-in-bottles into a black hole. It seems much better these days; there is lots of activity over at uservoice, with devs frequently posting, and problems being fixed reassuringly quickly. I mean, I had found a showstopper of a bug in a Burmese project I was working on, and I found a discussion about it already going on at uservoice. Instead of waiting years to see a fix for a complex script rendering bug (as old ID hands might expect), the devs had fixed it and published a new prerelease version with the fixes before I had to turn the project in to my client. 

Anyways, I'll get around to writing this one up, probably this weekend, if you don't yourself. What font were you using for your screenshots in your original post?

[biozaichenko]

Alright, I posted this bug on uservoice. Fingers crossed, someone will hear it.

[Peter Leverage]

Thanks. There seem to be 2 identical ones on there actually.

[Joel Cherney]

They're not entirely identical, insofar as the one I voted for has screenshots attached. I suspect that the post was probably duped in uservoice backend when you uploaded the screenshots. I wonder if that's not some kind of thing that can be resolved by calling the attention of the maintainers to the duplicate post; I'll give that a shot. 

[A2D2]

I am getting a similar problem, but using an Arabic font (Adobe Naskh) ... but I am not using a composite font

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/language-support-adobe-naskh-arabic-support-diac...