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• • May 8, 2018 at 10:12 am #103595
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hello everyone,
    I´m confronted with a very specific Glyph problem to which I cannot find a solution.

    So I´m working on some books which are partly in Spanish and partly in an indigenous language from the Amazonas. This language has some characters that have some kind of strikethrough. That´s all, nothing special, only a strikethrough. Now, I get the Word document ready with my font and size and everything looks perfect. But when I paste it into InDesign, ALL LETTERS that come after one of those special characters, get a strikethrough (the button in the paragraph adjustments for strikethrough gets activated). So when I select all and turn off the strikethrough, my indigenous letters will turn into normal letters.

    Here is a picture:

    View post on imgur.com

    In the picture you can see the original Word document and how the letters turn out in InDesign.
    And there is another problem, because if you look closely, Word shows a special Glyph for these characters, but the line is lower than the strikethrough in InDesign, so InDesign doesn’t even try to put the Glyph, only puts the strikethrough.
    (Numbers 26 to 33 in the picture in InDesign I adjusted manually, but as I say: the line is not in the height I want it to, and it´s a 200 pages book so….no way!)

    I don´t use paragraph styles nor character styles, because every word that is not in Spanish has to be in oblique, so I only change the font and size in Word and import it to InDesign.

    I hope somebody can solve this riddle! :)

  • May 9, 2018 at 8:00 am #103601
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Is it worth experimenting with Unicode U+0335 and U+0336, “combining short/long stroke overlay”, which need to be added after the letter to be overlaid?

    They give a similar effect, but are more along the lines of a combining diacritic and aren’t a “formatting” feature like strikethrough.
    That should also have the benefit of making the text more portable.

    You’d need to adjust the text with a find+replace, find “letter+strikethrough” and replace with “letter+combining overlay+no strikethrough” – worked for me in Word with Helvetica.

    Experimenting with the combining stroke overlay on the next lines here, but I suspect the IDS forum software won’t allow it (edit – it didn’t):
    r?
    p?

    Good luck,
    Chris.

  • May 10, 2018 at 10:19 am #103626
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hey!
    I think you´re on the right way: I have to replace ALL the strikethrough letters from the Word Document with letters that are “combining overlay+no strikethrough”. Yes? Or replace all those letters with Unicode U+0335 and U+0336?

    So I would like to try what you´re saying: find “letter+strikethrough” in Word and replace with “letter+combining overlay+no strikethrough”.
    Now…..I´m a little amateur with Word, I really never use it. I would appreciate very much if you could help me a little.
    I got this far:

    View post on imgur.com

    
    Here I go to the advanced find and replace dialog and choose down there “font”
    Then:

    View post on imgur.com

    
    I choose all the strikethrough letters.

    But where do I replace them with letter+combining overlay+no strikethrough?

    Thanks!!

  • May 11, 2018 at 12:40 am #103659
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Hi Marina, your reply came too late after I’d finished for the day.

    You’re nearly there.
    In general terms the find criteria = “any character that has a strikethrough” and the replace = “what you just found, plus the combining character, minus the strikethrough”.

    In detail, in the Advanced F+R…

    in the Find box, Special menu: “Any character” = caret and question mark (^?)
    Format menu: Font: Strikethrough checked

    in the Replace box, Special menu: “Find What Text” = caret and ampersand (^&) plus Combining Short Stroke Overlay* (on my Mac, inserted via the Emoji & Symbols palette**; on Windows presumably via the character palette or equivalent)
    Format menu: Font: Strikethrough unchecked

    *or the Long version, depending on taste – might be worth experimenting with the look of the strokes before committing yourself.

    That’s my workaround to the messiness of the strikethrough. But is this the correct way to do it? Is there even a standard way? I couldn’t find much about alphabets for Amazonian languages, and I don’t know what the stroke signifies, or which letters it can be applied to. Note that there are also a few pre-existing Latin letters with strokes as precomposed Unicode letters, e.g. U+0268 LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH STROKE
    ** you can search the Emoji & Symbols palette for the word “stroke” and it shows you which are available – that’s how I quickly found the stroke overlay characters, by searching for “overlay”

    I do like an obscure problem to solve!
    Good luck,
    Chris.

  • May 16, 2018 at 5:38 am #103637
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    This is what I did:
    I searched in Word every strikethrough i and replaced it with this letter: i? which I generated with a strikethrough tool online (originally to copy and paste for Facebook, etc.). When I copy it into InDesign, in Avenir Font it shows up as a missing Glyph but in Arial it works perfectly, the strikethrough button is turned of.

    Is that what you had in mind? Or am I creating maybe more trouble with this solution?

  • May 30, 2018 at 6:06 pm #104114
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I think they had some trouble with this forum, because I sent that last reply days before I got the message of your reply. Well anyway, your solution is really great!! It sure took some chess skills to trick these programmes. And I learned a lot, thank you so much! Yes, it´s always nice to solve some tricky puzzles :)
    There IS still one problem: in InDesign the Combining Short Stroke Overlay is really far off to the right. It just sticks there but it doesn´t really go through the letter. So I solved that by replacing in InDesign all Combining Short Stroke Overlay letters with the actual strikethrough when I finished placing the text. So it went back to where it was in the beginning, but without putting the strikethrough on all the text. Hope there´s no negative side effect to that, but until now it looks perfect :D ??

  • May 31, 2018 at 12:38 am #104122
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Thanks for the update.
    It looks like:
    Avenir doesn’t support the combining stroke overlays (i.e. the overlay characters aren’t in the font’s repertoire), so you get a “missing glyph” indicator.
    Arial behaves badly, with the stroke off to the right, as you describe.
    But it worked for me in InDesign with Geneva or Lucida Grande for example – it’s a matter of finding a font that supports that relatively obscure character.

    Anyway, glad you found a workaround! And I don’t think I saw your reply dated 16 May until today, alongside your reply of 30 May.
    Cheerio.

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