OpenFont Mess

[CV24163922k3xf]

Hi.

I'm using the Cormorant OpenFont Font in Cyrillic to format a scientific book. The font has a couple of glyphs for each character. InDesign has been, by default, contextually alternating characters, and the characters are all over the place, having multiple types of ks, rs and what have you (in Cyrillic) - unacceptable for a scientific publication. 

Now, even if I select the whole text and deselect Contextual Alternates from the Character menu, nothing changes. I can find/replace glyphs, but it's going to take a long time and in some cases it doesn't seem to work.

Is there a place where you can simply pre-select the ONLY glyphs from the font you're going to use and dismiss all other possibilities?

Thanks a million, I'm having a hard time, and already printed some copies having without noticing these differences...

Chris

[Steve Werner]

Your work and typographic needs are very different from mine, but this question occurred to me: Why are you using this particular OpenType Cyrillic font if it's causing so much trouble? Have you investigated using another font?

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

I don't think it's the font itself: the poster seems to understand how to use Unicode to set type in foreign languages.

@CV24163922k3xf, we do a fair amount of foreign language work as well as accessibility and both require utmost accuracy about Unicode glyphs. Adobe's features use their artificial intelligence to second guess which variation of the glyph you want...and you know that artificial intelligence is actually really stupid <grin>.

So we turn off all ligatures and contextual alternatives throughout InDesign and suggest you do the same. It goes deep but follow the instructions below, and keep them handy for future reference: sometimes when an upgrade is done, you'll lose your preferences settings and will have to reset them again.

1. Note where you are seeing signs of contextural alternatives are available. Your screen show any and all of these clues. The "O" anywhere on the text frame means OpenType alternate glyphs are available.

 

 

 

2. Turn off the overall availability of contextural alternatives in your Preferences. This will stop showing the pop-up options above. In the Advanced Type section, UNcheck the options to show character alternates and show adornment on text and text frames (that's all the pop-ups and the big blue "O" shown above).

Preference settings to turn off OpenType Alternate Glyphs.

 

3: In each of your paragraph and character styles, turn off the ligature and OpenType features (I believe this is where the AI comes in and swaps out the glyphs you really want).

In Basic Character section: UNcheck ligatures.

In Paragraph and Character styles, UNcheck the ligature options.

 

In the OpenType Features section: UNcheck nearly all of the options. We've found that each one, other than slash zero, causes glyph problems. And if you don't need slash zero for your language and material, then uncheck it, too.

In OpenType Features, Uncheck nearly every option.

Suggestion: build the style settings into your core, base body text style and then create additional styles based on it. That will pass down the settings to the rest of those in the document, which will make life a lot easier and sane!

It's not a perfect solution, but this should greatly reduce the problems you're having.

Best to you!

 

[CV24163922k3xf]

Thank you very much for this! I will indeed prepare my documents like this from now on.

Indeed, as @Joel Cherney writes, I am now dealing with a finished document, which is ready to be printed - and perhaps corrections now would be much harder, if not impossible.

[CV24163922k3xf]

I simply like it very much! And I would imagine InDesign's features allow for these otherwise useful options such as contextual alternates to be turned off.

[Joel Cherney]

I see that @Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com has already said most of what I'd say (thanks!), but I have a few follow-up questions:

1) Is the text keyed directly into InDesign? I am guessing not; it probably is written up in MS Word or another word-processing program, right? If you already have all of your content in InDesign then advice here won't help you out but there are ways to clean up the docs before placing, and ways to control the application of character and paragraph styling that will make your cleanup a lot faster and easier

2) Are you using paragraph and character styling? If not, there are a few scripts that will let you do multiple chained regular expression find/change actions all at once, that can help you climb out of a manual find/change hole. 

3) Have you looked at Stylistc Sets in the OpenType dialog? I see lots of variants being part of various Stylistic Sets when I look at the Glyphs panel.

4) Is the language that you're typesetting present in the Language dropdown in the Character panel? I am looking at the guts of Cormorant and I don't see how it would matter, but in some fonts you can't get the e.g. Abkhazian variants if you can't mark the text as Abkhazian, and of course there's no entry in the Language dropdown in InDesign for Abkhazian. This is fixable, and it really doesn't look like Cormorant is set up in this way, but it's worth looking at if nothing else we try works. 

[CV24163922k3xf · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the answer!

1) Yes, it was typed in MS Word, and these cleanup techniques would certainly be valuable to me in the future, especially with regard to the OpenType options of the font. And yes, I do have all my content in InDesign already, though I am considering starting from the beginning (would be quite tedious though)

2) I am using paragraph and character styling throughout, yes.

3) Stylistic Sets is an interesting way to go, but I can't seem to find an overview of what each set actually includes to be able to decide. In fact, if I am able to edit a stylistic set, perhaps it could offer a solution. At the end of the day, the Cormorant font offers some valuable glyphs from which I would like to select the ones I prefer. The issue here is consistency, not the Open Type features as such.

4) Language is present, yes, and the text is fully readable in this language anyway, even with the multiple variants of glyphs used.

[Joel Cherney]

As far as 1) goes, when you're placing a Word doc into an InDesign template, you can automatically apply character and paragraph styles by mapping styles in the Import Options. Very useful if your source Word text has any paragraph styles at all. Maybe not an effective use of time right now, but if there is ever a 2nd edition, it might be handy. 

The Stylistic Sets I mentioned in 3) are set up by the font designer; I was actually wondering if maybe they were active without your knowing it. It happens occasionally that someone with your question ("I didn't choose all these variant glyphs, why are they all over my document?") didn't know that they had a Stylistic Set turned on in a character style or something along those lines.

Lastly, even if you are using styles well, it's not hard to set up a find/change script that addresses a variety of glyphs all at once. I have a few examples that I can post if automating some find/change regular expressions would be useful to you. It might be best if you were to post a sample of your problem text if you'd like us to give that a try. 

[CV24163922k3xf]

To 1), I've used mapping options before, yes, it clearly saves time, but has had little to do with OpenType settings.

Thank you for your help so far, but I think I'm going to manage without the scripts! If I come to a dead end, I'll write back.

Cheers