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Russian words in Adobe Garamond Pro — and Stylistic Sets

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    • #62362
      Ann Farr
      Member

      Now and then I have to set a book which uses some Russian words in the text — one book was a list of Russian phrases used by Russian soldiers in World War II (not that I really wanted to know!).

      The house style used by the publisher (Helion & Co) always uses Adobe Garamond and I have the Pro version on my Mac which I've used in all versions of InDesign (I'm now on CS5.5). When I import authors' text I find they nearly always use Times/TNR and of course I can get the general look and feel of the text by using import options. However, Adobe Garamond Pro doesn't seem to have any Russian/Cyrillic characters, so I usually make a Character Style using (shock, horror!) Times for those words.

      Now and then, given time, I've tried using the Stylistic Sets which are found in the OpenType section of Paragraph Styles, but can't see any difference — not that I've actually tried very hard. What are they for?

      So my question is, if bog standard Times has all these different language characters, why can't I have them in Adobe Garamond Pro? It's OpenType and allows me to set the language to Russian but just gives me pink rectangles. So helpful!!

      Thank you, as ever, for all your help. What would we do without you?

    • #62364
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Because you're looking for Garamond Premier Pro. The regular Pro font doesn't have all those characters. Check it out:

      https://www.adobe.com/type/browser/landing/garamond/garamond.html

      There are also lots of other garamond cyrillic fonts on the web.

      As for stylistic sets, we talk about them in podcast 164: https://creativepro.com/indesignsecrets-podcast-164.php

    • #62365

      The presence or absence of characters in a font have nothing to do with Opentype (well … hardly), and, the suffix “Pro” does not indicate that as well. You'd have to ask Adobe, but I think the “Pro” gets added to a pre-existing font that is converted to Opentype format, and in which several previously distinct font files are merged. Pre-Opentype fonts had to have separate files for extra accented characters and ligatures, small capitals, old style digits — stuff like that. (That's just an observation. Since this is just Adobe's own private font naming convention, other font foundries are not obliged or forbidden to add or leave off the “Pro”.)

      So there is your answer. Cyrillic is in Times “because the designers added it”, and the reverse is true for Adobe Garamond Pro. (The actual language you assigned to your text has nothing to do with this …)

      Garamond Premier Pro, on the other hand, has Cyrillic characters. Perhaps you could switch fonts for your entire publication, or (mixing different Garamonds … a bit like blasphemy …) use Premier Pro for only the Cyrillic text …

      Something similar is going on with Stylistic Sets. There are no “rules” to what these ought to do for every font. In one font, for example, it might just change the appearance of the digit '0' to a slashed variant. In another, the lowercase 'a' and/or 'g' may switch from one story to a two story version; or something else may or may not happen, to only one character or to lots of them. For these variants you may want to read the documentation that came with each font.

    • #62366
      Ann Farr
      Member

      I just knew I'd get perfect answers. I wonder if the publisher/proof readers/actual readers would notice if I just changed all the templates to Garamond Premier Pro. Thank you so much for your help and your time and have a great weekend.

    • #62368
      David Goodrich
      Participant

      As for styles, you can define a character style for your Russian words, which would simplify manipulating the Cyrillic font. Applying it to every instance might not be trivial unless the manuscript came with the Russian language attribute already applied to those terms: ID can search for individual language attributes, but unfortunately they frequently are not applied properly in the first place, or get “moved” during import into ID; they may need fixing as they can interfere with hyphenation. I find a character style that includes language in the definition very handy for this. (I first studied Russian with a gentleman who also taught soldiers at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, including an advanced course on swearing; Russian slang has never been easy to pick up, so ID's hyphenation might not be very useful.)

      David

    • #62369

      Applying it to every instance might not be trivial …

      But it is :)

      Per latest Unicode Reference, the following blocks are designated “Cyrillic”:

      Cyrillic: U+0400 – U+04FF
      Cyrillic Supplement: U+0500 – U+052F
      Cyrillic Extended-A: U+2DE0–U+2DFF, 32 characters
      Cyrillic Extended-B: U+A640–U+A69F, 96 characters

      With this single GREP search you can locate any span of valid Cyrillic characters:

      [x{0400}-x{04FF}x{0500}-x{052F}x{2DE0}-x{2DFF}x{A640}-x{A69F}]+

      … it's a bit longish … I think in general it might be safe to simply use the 'standard' range 0400 – 052F, the “Extended” parts seem to be added for “Old Slavonic” and “Old Cyrillic” characters only.

      Space and punctuation such as comma and periods do not fall in this range, so you might want to include them to grab entire sentences:

      [x{0400}-x{052F}]([ [:punct:]x{0400}-x{052F}]+)*

      will flesh out the entire Russian phrase inside

      “How are you?” “???????, ??????. ? ? ????” “I'm fine, thank you!”

      (It also picks up all of the punctuation right after that phrase, but theoretically that's not a problem. If it does, an even longer GREP could limit this to a “reasonable” set as well.)

    • #62374
      David Goodrich
      Participant

      I use GREP's ability to find text by Unicode block all the time, but usually for CJK, which seem more isolated way up there. I suppose my caution about treating Cyrillic similarly stems from code-page habits learned long ago (and long out-dated). In my kind of work (scholarly text, mostly English with bits of this and that), I'd probably adapt Jongware's 2nd search to x{0400}-x{052F}]+, skipping the punctuation and word-spaces. Once I'd GREP-ed all the Russian into a char. style with the language attribute and a different font I'd go back and fix what's left in the original font. ID's Find Font is fabulous for cleaning up multi-lingual text, and so is Jongware's “slow-but-sure” script for identifying all the languages used.

      David

    • #62375
      Ann Farr
      Member

      This is a marvellous discussion and I've taken note of everything. Good news for me (fingers crossed): I emailed the publisher last night and he has agreed to let me set a book in Garamond Premier Pro — following which I might be allowed to set up all new templates for use in setting all books.

      Thank you all so much.

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