Indesign not recognizing cyrillic characters

[ms43057373]

Hi,

I have a font (officina sans) that supports Cyrillic, however Indesign (CC) refuses to display Cyrillic characters in glyphs. When I type using the Russian keyboard or attempt to paste in text it just displays as squares. When I look at the glyphs in font book, the Cyrillic alphabet shows up, and other programs (pages, etc) seem to have no problem with the font. How do I get Indesign to recognize the font? I'm setting up a book, and need to use this specific font for consistency with the English text.

[Kasyan Servetsky]

Most probably you have an outdated version of the font which InDesign can't recognize: PostScript or TrueType. OpenType version should work without any issues. At least, I've never had any problems with OpenType fonts.

— Kas

[Jongware]

You can check Kasyan's suggestion by applying another (correct) font such as Arial or Times New Roman. If your text appears, the problem lies in the font.

Try this, and report what it says: call up the Glyphs panel and select your font. Hover the mouse over a Cyrillic character; a popup should appear, giving some information on that character. What does it say?

Alternatively, insert such a character in your document and select it. Call up the Info panel; it will tell you the Unicode number for that character. What does it say, for which character?

[ms43057373]

Thanks for both of your answers. I tried typing in Arial and converting to an open type format copy of Officina, which worked. The Cyrillic characters still aren't showing up in glyphs, and they show up as squares if I type in Officina, but converting from Arial seems to work.

[Anna Lander]

Check also your font style. Sometimes you can have a style (e.g. Medium or Semibold) which is absent in another font set. If it's default in your document, this may cause the problem. Converting between families with the most common style sets adjusts it and you see a good result.

[Kasyan Servetsky · Accepted solution]

ms43057373  wrote

Thanks for both of your answers. I tried typing in Arial and converting to an open type format copy of Officina, which worked. The Cyrillic characters still aren't showing up in glyphs, and they show up as squares if I type in Officina, but converting from Arial seems to work.

If you want to fix an existing font, converting it won't solve the problem. Though I'm not sure what you mean by converting: which exactly convertor you used. 15+ years ago I tested about a dozen of them trying to fix Cyrillic fonts and none of them worked for me.

Our designers are crazy about using fonts of doubtful provenance which usually don't have all the necessary characters (glyphs), or don’t print on a laser printer, or which RIP fails to process, etc.

I use the following approach which always works no matter how bad a font is:

1. I import the problematic font into FontLab 4.6/5.2
2. Then I create a brand-new font, choose a Cyrillic encoding (Mac/Windows) and copy all the font properties from the ‘bad’ font. There is button which allows to do this in one step.
3. After that I copy ranges of glyphs into correct cells.
4. Finally, I export the font to OpenType keeping the original format: PostScript or TrueType.

— Kas