Page Numbering with OpenType

[JoyceOdell]

Okay, I've been doing .pdfs for yonks, and setting up the page numbering the way it seems to have been done ever since InDesign launched. Now there seems to be a new wrinkle to be ironed out.

Most fonts come with ruling numbers, or maybe it's tabular numbers, whatever. Quite a few type families *used to* come with cuttings which included old-style numbers. If you wanted old-style numbers for your page numbers, you just chose that cutting to have the pages numbered in.

OpenType fonts typically include both in the same character set, and you can only get at the old-style numbers by selecting the number you want to change, waiting for the popup, and manually changing it. There is no separate cutting with old style numbers to choose to number the pages with.

Is there any way to set up page numbering to use the hidden old-style characters? Or, for that matter, of globally changing all the numbers in a document to old-style, when you are using one of those faces instead of having to go through the document and changing them one by one?

Or am I supposed to open the font up in Fontogropher, build a new font of just old-style figures and use *that*?

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

> OpenType fonts typically include both in the same character set, and you can only get at the old-style numbers by selecting the number you want to change, waiting for the popup, and manually changing it.

Of course not! If your font supports OpenType numbering styles the proper way, all you have to do is select the digits to chance and then choose your preferred style of digits in the Character panel drop-down menu – it has a submenu of its own. That is to manually chance a few digits; but there is even a better way. Find the "OpenType Features" in the Paragraph Style formatting list, and you'll see that Numbers have a dedicated dropdown select list of their own.

It is not a 'document wide' setting, though (which would make as much sense as a document-wide font size setting). But if you have carefully set up your paragraph styles (such as making all of the derived styles for your Body Text styles based on that style "Body Text"), then yes, it's a single change.

[JoyceOdell]

Thank you. That's a big help. Defining the master page text frame for the page number as a paragraph was the part I was missing. This works despite the fact that those "paragraphs" contain no digits on the master pages?

I suspect I learned the process too early and haven't kept current with the tools.