Diane wrote:
I have imported a Word doc into InDesign and had a glyph weirdness. When I chose Adobe Garamond Pro, all of my commas, periods and other punctuations turned into smaller and higher placed versions of themselves. But when I choose Garamond Premier Pro it doesn’t happen.
Floating punctuation is a classic problem having to do with the Fractions OpenType feature: When the Fractions feature is enabled, some OpenType fonts exhibit this behavior, and some don’t.
So check your paragraph style, your character style, or any local formatting that might be applied to the font. As we’ve said before we do not recommend leaving the Fraction feature on for all your text — just apply it to the text that really is a fraction. You can turn this on/off from the OpenType submenu, in the Character panel menu, or the Control panel menu:
Also, check our Guide to OpenType Fractions for more information.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on September 19, 2007
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Hi Jamie,
When XMPie looks at a CSV file and determines that a column or field is a numeric value, we treat that field like a number. This means we remove commas (not periods), so that you can format the field as you need it.
This is what you do. Right-Mouse/Ctrl+click the field’s name in the content object list, choose Edit Rule. Then turn on Extended Function if needed (v2.7x there is a checkbox, in v8 it is always on). In the drop-down list with the fieldnames, select FormatNumber function.
The way this function works is, you tell it the number to format and the way you want to format it. FormatNumber(someNumber, somePattern) You replace someNumber with your data fieldname, and the somePattern with characters. A hash (#) as a placeholder will show numbers, only if needed, and zero (0) as a placeholder shows 0 only when the number is a zero or that position is empty. Use the other characters like periods, dollar signs and such where appropriate.
For example, if my column was called Amount, my rule would look like this in the Rule Editor:
Value = FormatNumber ( [#] Amount , String $ ###,##0.00 )
Of course, if you don’t need the dollar sign, don’t include it. And you can add more hash marks for more number placeholders (###,###,###). Personally, I like to use the 0.00 at the end; this way, my dollars and pennies look right (the amount of 1000.10 would be formatted as $ 1,000.10 and for a zero amount the design would show $ 0.00).
Hope that helps,
deb
For more information on formatting you can write to su*****@***ie.com or check out FormatNumber() in the User Guide (appendix A).
I work with InDesign CC 2015. I have a plug -in called XMPIE that I use to merge files. I use CSV files for the merge. When working with numbers over 999 like 1,000 and up I loose the comma. Why is this happening? I have worked in an older version of InDesign with the same CSV and the commas are there.
Thanks
jaime
Thanks for this article. I just came across this issue with Garamond and thought it looked mighty odd. Whilst working through a tutorial today I turned on the Fractions setting in the OpenType options.
I’ve now turned it off again. Nice… all those floating commas and full stops have come back down to Earth again.
Thanks.
Jonathan
It must be a bug in a great many fonts, David. For a particularly impressive scramble, turn on ordinals in Hypatia Sans Pro or Minion Pro. Adobe Caslon and Adobe Garamond Pro work just fine, but well over a half dozen fonts, many of the most useful, bounce off into bizarro land if you turn on the ordinals feature.
It just seems like something so basic should work right. Open Type features don’t seem quite ready for primetime.
Well, it’s Sept 20th and I’ve just run into the “floating punctuation” problem for the first time, ha. Thank you so much David for writing this article! You’ve saved my nerves from being fried.
I’m glad you like the poster, Mitch!
That’s very interesting about the ordinals… it does work for the “a” and “o” ordinals used in some other languages. But it seems likely that this is a bug in the font, not InDesign. After all, the ordinals (st, nd, rd) work fine in Adobe Caslon Pro.
There’s another, related problem. When using the ordinal open type selection with Garamond Premier Pro, it garbles the text. It does NOT create ordinals where it should (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) but superscripts every a and o in the story.
I found this problem first with CS2, but it does not seem to have been fixed with CS3. At least, the problem persists here. CS3 has lots of wonderful features, but it would have been nice if Adobe had fixed such a glaring and annoying bug.
On a totally unrelated note, I just got your Keyboard Shortcuts poster for CS3, and it rocks!