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• • February 26, 2014 at 11:02 am #67353
    Simon Duckworth

    Participant

    Hey Everybody – this one’s a bit tricky! Maybe I’m looking at the problem the wrong way around, but anyway, here goes…

    I’m using an Opentype face, and am trying to find an efficient way of changing a single glyph to use the alternate version of one of the glyphs (letter ‘a’ if you were wondering).

    I’ve looked online for a solution and the Glyph panel in the Find/Change dialogue box will let me make the switch, but I’d like more control than that – I’d like to be able to use the alternate glyph in some styles (headers) and not others (body text) from a styling point of view. I can see that the Para styles have options to use ‘Stylistic Sets’ but I can’t find out how to set them up – or even if they’re automatically loaded in with the font. Failing that, would a GREP within the para style be able to handle this – a long shot given that it’s formatting rather than a content change per se.

    Does anyone know of a straightforward way to do this? I’m using InDesign CC.

  • February 26, 2014 at 11:20 am #67354
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Very cool idea, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way to do this with a paragraph style or grep style because it’s literally changing characters/glyphs.

    Well, I should say: it might be possible, but it depends on the font. For example, Minion Pro Italic does have a stylistic set with some alternate characters. So if you made a character style that changes the text to Stylistic Set 2, you could apply that with a grep style to a particular character (such as an e in this font). That does seem to work. But most fonts I’ve tried don’t have that.

  • February 27, 2014 at 3:34 am #67357
    Simon Duckworth

    Participant

    Thanks David, I’m loathe to use character styles to force alts because you can only apply one character style at a time (I might want to put some of the text containing an alt character in italic, bold etc.)

    It turns out there’s a pretty straightforward way!

    I’ve done some digging around and (I think) made some sense of stylistic sets. These are available to apply in the Opentype tab on the paragraph style dialogue box, you just have to know what stylistic set does what (and that’s the main problem with this). InDesign names these sets numerically (you can’t change them), so the key is to check the font documentation, it should give you a list of what set does what, just note the number and select it in InDesign. I don’t know why ID/Opentype don’t seem to support custom naming of these because it’s a great feature, just not particularly intuitive to use.

    Obviously, this only applies to Opentype fonts with alt features.

    Anyway – I hope this helps someone with the same issue…

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