Struggling to get GREP to work with ligatures

[Zsaber]

Hello all, I'm going absolutely bonkers over this one.

I am designing my own trading card game and I require the use of symbols, similar to Magic the Gathering. I have already created a font with ligatures and symbols to do this, but I needed the symbols to be color coded when ran through InDesign's data merge. I worked around this by assigning GREP styles to each ligature callout with the correct color, and the symbols changed accordingly. It was working perfectly.

The frustrating thing that's happening now is that I had it all working properly and even have sample cards correctly printed with the colored symbols - however, after taking a few months break from designing, I come back to the document after an adobe update and suddenly everything is out of whack. All my symbols are black only, and nothing I do can change the colors.

Does anyone know what happened, or how to fix this? Perhaps there's a way to create a font where the symbols are pre-colored so when they're called it's automatically the right color? I am really lost here, because I did a lot of research a few years back to get it working properly and suddenly all my progress has been destroyed.

Any help at all would be so greatly appreciated.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can you share a sample document? Can be privately if you prefer - please click my nickname.

[Robert at ID-Tasker · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the file - I'm not a font expert - but maybe it has something to do with the fact, that Adobe no longer supports PostScript Type 1 fonts?  Yes, your font is TTF - but maybe you've used some Type 1 related feature or something?

The rest - on priv.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Ligatures can be a real pita because most text software is designed to "see" them as two separate letters but then apply a sort of GREP replacement of the letter with one ligature glyph. Any kind of operation that falls in between these polarities will misfire.

So just a question: are you using GREP to search for the specific Unicode ligature glyphs? Or making use of the glyph search to find them? That is, not looking for 't + i' but the specific t-i ligature glyph?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@James Gifford—NitroPress

It's a bit more complicated in this case...