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• • October 26, 2011 at 2:58 am #60911
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Using a font for a complex text (many ligatures), and the font having a glyph for spaces, InDesign adds spaces also between the members of the ligature. Since the added spaces are implicit, I cannot select them and change their colour, so that is not a workaround. I have checked the spacing rules, it shows that there should be no spaces added between letters, yet it does. Using ID5.5/Japanese. All suggestions and workarounds are welcome.

    

    (what is written there is: “kaa a”. The space character is the dot that you can see — there shouldn't be dots under the first syllable.)

    Thank you in advance

    Péter Sisák

  • October 26, 2011 at 1:37 pm #60916
    joelcherney

    Member

    Are you using a font that has a proprietary encoding, or is it a Unicode font? I only ask because I don't recognize the script, at all… which is unusual, I thought I could identify any living language by eyeballing a few glyphs.

    If you don't know what I mean, just select any one glyph in InDesign, then go to Type -> Glyphs. Your one highlighted glyph will show up; if you mouse over it, a popup should identify the glyph name. If the glyph is not named correctly in that mouseover popup, then you are using some kind of non-Unicode font. In that case, I'd suggest looking at the kerning setting and making sure that it's not set to Optical. If you're using an old-fashioned proprietary-encoding font, then you'll mouse over a glyph and it will say something like “LATIN CAPITAL A WITH DIAERESIS.” InDesign will follow suit by treating your supposed-to-be-combining glyph as an a-with-diaeresis, which will generate spurious spaces.

    Lastly, in case this is not helpful: please do post again with more details. What's the name of the font you are using? Do these ligatures work correctly in other OpenType-aware applications? And please, please do tell us what language that is!

    Edited (for typos)

  • October 26, 2011 at 2:49 pm #60917
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    It is an Unicode font. The script is called Mandombe, it is an African script, technically an alphabet that is arranged into syllable blocks, somewhat like Korean. Further details you can find on Wikipedia, if interested. While there exists at least one font out there already, currently I'm working on another one myself (a sample of which you've just seen above).

    InDesign identifies the glyphs as “liga” (which they are, mostly; “liga” and “rlig” tables of the OT spec), together with their correct constituents, so as far as recognition goes, no issue. The space ($0020) character is a dot, which is what you can see above, just too many of them — under the syllable should be no extra dots, particularly since two of the diacritics used for marking various diphthongs are also either one or two dots respectively, creating confusion. Notepad works with the ligas and adds no extra dots/spaces, but obviously nothing that you can make anything of publication quality. WordPad cannot handle it, it writes no ligas but individual disconnected glyphs. Word 2010, by setting it to use ligatures, will do just a fine job, both liga as well as kerning-wise. QXP9 doesn't put dots under the syllables, but doesn't draw the one belonging to the “Space” char either, so no good.

    What's written there is just “kaa a”, not intended to mean anything, merely used to illustrate the issue.

    How further?

  • October 27, 2011 at 2:55 am #60921
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Apparently Mandombe isn't allocated a range in Unicode.

    Theory 1: Are the font glyphs in a private area, or using code points for something else. If the latter, maybe InDesign is applying different rules based on what should be in those code points?

    Theory 2: Is the font designed to make use of complex script features, such as in Indian languages. If so, standard InDesign won't process them properly, and you might need World-Ready Paragraph Composer turned on, either by script or by plugin.

    Any other theories anyone?

  • October 27, 2011 at 12:57 pm #60933
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I think this is an InDesign issue. I've just tested a custom font that contains ligatures and an outline in the space glyph and got the same problem in InDesign CS 5.5 as described by quinyu.

    I believe what's happening is that InDesign uses the space glyph to help place the I-beam caret on ligatures.

  • October 27, 2011 at 3:35 pm #60934
    joelcherney

    Member

    Wow! Now that is a really cool script. I'm not terribly suprised that I don't remember seeing it in the past; West African scripts are a weak point for me. If someone had told me that it composed like hangul I am sure I would have paid closer attention. :)

    As far as this issue goes: I'd strongly suggest defining that non-whitespace single-dot word divider someplace that is not 0020. Fonts for scripts that have non-whitespace word dividers, like Ge'ez, typically encode them elsewhere. (x1361 “ETHIOPIC WORD SPACE”) Fonts that have spaces that would diverge significantly from a generic ASCII space (e.g. fullwidth and halfwidth spaces for East Asian scripts) also encode those spaces someplace that is not 0020. I'm no font designer, so I wonder what “best practices” are here, but I can't think of an argument against leaving the ASCII space for ASCII. Sorry, but it looks like we (“we” being “people who care about complex scripts” here) will be working around the ethnocentric assumptions of mid-20th-century computing wonks for, well, for as long as Western Civ exists.

    I've just tested a custom font that contains ligatures and an outline in the space glyph and got the same problem in InDesign CS 5.5 as described by quinyu.

    I can't see it as an InDesign issue, really; it's an ASCII issue, and you can expect other apps besides InDesign to be picky about what is encoded in ASCII. It's the kind of thing that software developers assume to be set in stone.

    and you might need World-Ready Paragraph Composer turned on

    Pretty sure that the Japanese composer will respect all of the relevant OT methods. :) However, quinyu, you should probably go and learn how to turn the WRC on and off so that people who aren't you might be able to use your font in non-JP ID at some point in the future.

  • October 31, 2011 at 4:07 pm #60959
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    quinyu, you can work around this problem by switching to the World-Ready Composer. The Roman Composer adds a space glyph for ligatures so glyph to character mappings are one to one.

    There's no option in the User Interface for switching to the WRC, so you'll have to do it via scritping. So do these steps:

    1. In InDesign, select the text

    2. Launch the ExtendScript Toolkit app

    3. In ESTK, select “Adobe InDesign CS5.5 (7.5)” from the combobox

    4. Copy and paste in ESTK this line of code: app.selection[0].composer = 'Adobe World-Ready Single-line Composer';

    5. Click on the play button.

    You can go back to the Roman composer via the UI through the flyout menu in the Paragraph panel.

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