The questions is copied word-for-word from a query at the Adobe forums in May 2012, except for changing the number of footnotes. Wouldn’t it be polite to at least acknowledge that older thread?

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/998234

Thank you for providing this list, which wasn’t east to compile. (And no, I wasn’t offended by your broad generalizations earlier.)

For the sake of completeness, I’ll add the Windows system font Calibri, which is what my Word 2010 applied when I copied the string of characters from your thread<https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1477415&gt; over on Adobe’s InDesign forum:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Maintype tells me all 6 members of the Calibri family (as installed with Win7 and copyrighted 2012) contain 2,161 characters In addition to the usual four styles (Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic) the family includes Light and Light Italic. Wikipedia says Calibri replaced Times NR as the default typeface in Word back in 2007<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibri&gt;, which may make it more challenging to use in a cutting-edge design.

David

Here is my real response to this thread, submitted earlier today, now stripped of two hrefs that may have caused the reply to a February thread to be re-dated. Are we not supposed to insert links? Anyway, here goes:

Are we talking print? If so then coding of the glyphs doesn’t matter so long as they appear correctly on paper. “Correctly” allows a lot of leeway, but even pair kerning is relatively simple and accessible in Postscript Type 1 fonts of the previous century. However, if there is a chance your efforts may become available electronically then you should ensure the encoding is correct.

Font technology didn’t stand pat with PS Type 1, and Opentype opened a new era of “intelligent,” much more complex fonts. Nice as Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro is (mine dates from 2005), and although it does offer macron vowels (if that is what you mean by “vowels with lines above them”), it includes neither the dotted letters you need nor the special “Combining Diacritics” Unicode added in the range U+0300–036F. Even when font licenses allow modification, actually adding new diacritcs or letter-diacritic combinations takes professional tools whose cost is steep in both dollars and learning curve: simply preserving the kerning when modifying a nice, modern typeface isn’t trivial, though this is fundamental for maintaining typographic quality.

Before attempting to de-compile a complex Opentype font you might want to look into Peter Kahrel’s script for entering diacritics in InDesign. I see that he renders underdots with the “Spacing Dot Above”, U+02D9, which may be more common in existing fonts but could mislead electronic searching and indexing; he re-positions this by means of a character style, allowing one to substitute a “Combining Dot Below” (U+0323) borrowed from a more recent font. In an update to his documentation he points to Jongware’s Indyfont, an amazing—and free—InDesign javascript for making single-character fonts from within InDesign. One fly in the ointment is that you lose automatic kerning when you change fonts unless you can live with ID’s “Optical Kerning” (or set up Kahrel’s kerning script); if Indyfont works for you then you might want to buy the Pro version (note that, useful as it is, it doesn’t attempt to replace a true font editor).

However, a careful Arabic transcription project sounds like lots of dotted characters, and good kerning doesn’t just happen. I’d look seriously at what fonts are out there with the characters you need already built in, particularly in the scholarly world—proper Sanskrit romanization also requires many dotted letters.

I hope my href links survive, if not a search engine should quickly find Peter Kahrels’s site.

Good luck
David

Windows or Mac? If the former, have you tried Microsoft’s Maori input system described here? If Mac, perhaps SIL’s <a
href=”https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele”>Ukelele would let you customize input.

There is also Kahrel’s Compose javascript, though he warns this is better for multi-lingual work rather than typing in a particular language.

I confess I have not tried either of the keyboard-driver fixes, though I type a fair amount of macron vowels (for romanizing Japanese or for Chinese pinyin tones). Often I add a digit “one” after the vowel which I later search-and-replace — as you say, inelegant. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using MS Word’s auto-correct to automate the replacement, but never actually gotten that far.

David

There are a number of threads about CSV and UTF-8 over on Adobe’s ID forums, including <https://forums.adobe.com/message/4533952#4533952&gt;.

Jongware wrote a Javascript for ID as explained here that can create ID footnotes out of what it thinks are Word endnotes imported into InDesign. If you can make your file look like as though it has endnotes, i.e., insert the exact text “(Endnotes)” ahead of a series of notes, it may be able to do the trick.

If you really want to control footnotes, then you may need to skip ID’s limited automation altogether, and go back to the way we used to do it: make a separate story for notes, and thread it across the foot of relevant pages. More practically, when I need don’t like where ID breaks a paragraph in the footnotes I try to control it by adjusting the paragraph’s Keep Options, settings the number of lines allowed by Keep Lines Together either before or after to force the break I want. Obviously, this may need re-adjusting if pages re-flow.

David