PT Serif Pro bold shortcut does not work in InDesign

[SerikAd]

The PT Serif Pro bold shortcut (shift+ctrl+b) does not work in indesign. The underline (shift+ctrl+u) and italic (shift+ctrl+i) shortcuts work fine. And in Illustrator with this font (PT Serif Pro) there is no such problem. All shortcuts work.
The font is installed from Adobe Fonts. I reset all settings. I tried in 20.3 and 20.4. I even tried assigning shortcuts to other keys. Nothing worked.
If the problem is in the font itself, why does the shortcut work in Illustrator?

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @SerikAd,

Thanks for reporting this and sorry to hear you're running into this shortcut issue. Could you please confirm the version of InDesign you're currently using and share your operating system details? Also, let me know if this happens with all documents or only specific ones, even newly created files.

Additionally, try signing out and back into Creative Cloud and clear the font cache using the steps here: https://adobe.ly/4nbqLAd. Let me know if that makes any difference.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek 

[SerikAd]

Win 10, InDesign 20.4 (also 20.3). It doesn't work with any of the documents. But it still works in Illustrator.

I've tried every way. Even reinstalled everything.
It doesn't work on macOS either.

[SerikAd]

Is there any progress on this issue?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

This is an error on the font designer's part. You might want to talk to paratype about this:

In order for most programs to make a family association between font styles, the designer needs to base the family name on the same base font. This hasn't been done with the version of PT Serif Pro being served currently on Adobe fonts.

In my sample here, you can see they erroneously labeled the family name of the Bold to PT Serif Pro Bold instead of the proper PT Serif Pro. Because of this, using the bold style key commands in InDesign can't find it.

Below: The Adobe Fonts versions are at top left and right. Below that are the Regular and Bold of PT Serif that's included in the Mac OS for comparison, which is correctly defined.

You can still use the fonts of course; you just have to manually asign the bold version to your text instead of relying on key commands (which have fallen out of favour in recent years anyway)

I'm not sure what you mean by it's not happening in Illustrator, as there are no such bold style key commands there. You have to select the Bold implicitly in the Character Style menu

[SerikAd]

In Illustrator, the keyboard shortcut ctrl+shift+b applies bold to selected text. And this keyboard shortcut works with the PT Serif Pro font.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Ah, sorry. I was looking at Mac Illustrator. It does not have those key shortcuts defined (at least by default, anyway)

I guess illustrator is picking up the reference for Bold from a different part of the font info, and not the family name.

I guess the question now is why InDesign and illustrator have different ways.

[SerikAd]

Illustrator on Mac also has this default keyboard shortcut. Just cmd instead of ctrl as usual.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Ooops. Yes, you are correct. I had a custom keyboard shortcuts in place (maybe because of some conflict. Don't remember why 🙂

But, as it turns out, the shortcuts for Bold, Italic didn't exist prior to CC2024 so are a recent addition. If I switch back to Default they show up for me.

[Eugene Tyson]

Well, I wouldn't apply bold/italic/underline with the shortcuts for these, sure it's fine if you want to work like that.

But do you not make Character Styles? If you create the styles you can then assign a custom shortcut to apply the Bold/Italic/Underline as character styles. 

You don't need to put in PT in the font family - just need to leave that part blank and inser Bold in the part underneaths. 

Same for the other styles you want. 

There's a free script called PrepText that can cycle through your InDesign Story and find and apply styles correctly so it can build the Bold/Italic/Underline etc. styles in the Character Style panel for you. 

It's worth considering.

[SerikAd]

Well, my question is not how to make the text bold.
But thanks anyway.

[Eugene Tyson]

No you're question is about applying a shortcut. And considering the font itself might be the issue you can apply a style instead and assign a shortcut to the style.

Which is what you want to do.

And using styles is highly recommended anyway.

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @SerikAd,

Thanks so much for your patience while we looked into this deeper. I checked with our product and font engineering teams, and here's what they shared:

The PT Serif Pro font doesn't have 'style linking' set up for the Bold style. In other words, even though the font includes a Bold weight, it's not technically linked to the Regular style in the way that InDesign needs for the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut to work. This is a deliberate choice by the font foundry and not a bug in InDesign.

As a workaround, you can set up a Character Style with Bold applied and then assign a custom shortcut to that style. This will let you quickly apply Bold using your own shortcut in InDesign.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Looking forward to your update!

Abhishek