Actually, I might just be able to turn off Contextual Alternates in the style itself because that seems to be what it’s about. I’ll see what that does to other stuff before I do anything wholesale to all the characters though.

Hi all!

Thanks for the input! And my apologies for the slow response — I read everything but couldn’t come back to this for while due to a deadline. And David, yes, that is the article I was remembering!!!

BUT — it turns out the entire premise behind my question was wrong, hah. I misunderstood something about the Glyphs panel. I thought each glyph that was shown was an entirely different character. I didn’t realize that an alternate character is still the same character. I figured it out because I was doing Find-and-Replace on the apostrophes and kept mixing things up the find and replace fields. It seemed like the exact same find-and-replace would do opposite things. I finally found the apostrophe that looked right to me and selected it and said “new character style.” Here’s the character style I needed:

I did NOT realize you could call the alternate selection for a character like that!

And now that I know that, I’ll use a GREP style. :) I’ll base all the styles in this font off a base that includes that. :) I already have that based on a base style (per someone’s helpful class one time). Now I just need an additional base for the styles that use the font that has an ugly apostrophe in it.

Am I the only one who didn’t know that the alternates for the same character work like this?

Thanks, Phyllis

Thanks. I was looking to see if there’s an automated approach though (to prevent doing find-and-replace repeatedly). I have editors constantly updating copy, and that automatically brings in the old apostrophe over and over (and I’m trying to make proofs at various stages of the process without having a bad character inside it). I thought I remembered a technique of somehow building the change in — it was whatever method allowed you to type an abbreviation and have it automatically convert to a name. Maybe that was in different software though!

Thanks, I just got a response from a printing company in Europe, and they think the original setup was a mistake that no one noticed. That’s an odd mistake! I’m switching it back to odd numbers on the right!

Oh, and just to be clear, the publication is in English though it will be distributed in Germany and I’ll be working with a printing company in Europe as well. It occurs to me that I don’t even know if I should label the covers Covers 1-4 or if those numbers would reference the covers differently there! And I don’t have a clue how to pick the paper weights, though at least I can get a recommendation! Thanks.

Thanks, David! Funny you mentioned Extensis as I wrote them earlier. I’ll check the other one you mention. I’m writing to different ones to try to get a better idea what they do. I kind of feel like we need some sort of hybrid — a cloud management system that refers back to files that we host (so that we don’t have to transfer many terrabytes into the cloud). But anyway, I’ve written to a few places. And I’ve emailed the author of the article in your magazine to see if she does any consulting! :) Because I don’t know why they hit me with these kind of questions. That’s more IT than graphic design. But I get all kinds of computer questions — even how to use word processing software. Graphic design = all computer stuff I guess (to some folks anyway). ;-)

Thanks. :)