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• • November 12, 2015 at 6:46 pm #79404
    ll1324

    Member

    I’ve been looking all over the documentation … suppose you have a string / text / word / paragraph / line (whatever) such as “differ”, and I want to extract the glyphs actually used, which (if we have ligatures turned on and the font supports it) would yield “d – i – ff (ligature ff glyph) – e – r”.

    Getting individual characters used in a string / text / word / paragraph / etc. (e.g. “d – i – f – f – e – r”) is really easy, but is there a way to extract or dump what all the glyphs (not the characters), i.e. what you see on the screen?

  • November 15, 2015 at 8:37 am #79454
    Peter Kahrel

    Participant

    The string ‘differ’ that you see on screen doesn’t contain any underlying ligature: ‘ff’ is just rendered as a ligature on your screen. You can see that in (at least) two ways: you can place the cursor between the two f’s, and when you select the word, the Info panel reports 6 characters. So I don’t think it’s possible to get the dump you’re after.

  • November 15, 2015 at 9:06 am #79455
    ll1324

    Member

    What I’m after is getting the glyph that is rendered on the screen. The “ff” appears as two characters in the string (which is normally what you get) but the glyph is only one “character”.

    This is particularly nasty when one is rendering non-Latin languages, especially fonts with encoding table problems. Some of them are notorious for rendering fine on Apple’s software (such as pages) and coming out totally wrong in InDesign. The solution usually is either to switch fonts (which solves the problem but changes the font of course), or edit the font’s encoding tables with a font editor (which for some languages, is a lot of work). The thing is the glyphs are all there, so if one can dump the glyphs, that would also do the trick (since they’re all unicode).

    Sometimes in desperation, one resorts to opening the glyphs screen and clicking the glyphs, but that is time consuming compared to typing at the keyboard.

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