Dave wrote:
Much of the stuff I do requires headlines or subheads IN ALL CAPS. I make a paragraph style using the Case: All Caps setting in the Paragraph Style Dialog box. This will make the text all-caps but then mark each word in yellow highlighting as if it were a substituted glyph issue!
It has been a while since we tackled the dreaded highlighting “problem.” I put the word in quotes because it turns out it’s usually not a problem at all, but it can certainly freak you out if you don’t know what’s going on.
Every so often, you’ll find documents in which text is highlighted in a dark yellow — not all the text, but a little bit here and a little bit there. Usually all the “fi” and “fl” ligatures are highlighted; sometimes whole words that are in all caps or small caps. The reason: Substituted Glpyhs is turned on the Composition pane of the Preferences dialog box:
Substituted glyphs means any character in the text which is being substituted for something else; so you’ll always get it with ligatures and formatting in which a lower case character is swapped out for a capital or small cap.
This is a document preference rather than an application preference; that is, if you turn it on when a document is open, just that one document remembers the change. But it also means that you can open a document from someone else and see it (because they turned it on). Here’s an example:
So should you panic? Rebuild your preferences? Reinstall the entire Creative Suite? Buy a new computer? Sure! Though of course none of those things will make the yellow go away. Instead, I suggest you just turn off the Substituted Glyphs checkbox, take a deep breath, and know that substituted glyphs are not a big deal in InDesign. :)
For more on composition highlighting in preferences, check out Anne-Marie’s excellent post from a while back.
This article was last modified on December 21, 2021
This article was first published on December 26, 2011
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