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Align openType font option from InDesign supported?


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Hello,

 

Our Customer use indesign to make a buisnisscard with variable names using Fusion PRO and DSF.

They use an open type special font for telefone and faxnumbers.

In Indesign they change the opentypefont option " Tabular Lining"

so that the numbers use equal spacing and the result is aligned.

After exporting it to Fusion PRO the telefone numbers are not aligned (especially with the "1" wich will take less space.)

 

Is this option supported in Fusion PRO??

 

Regards Marcel

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Unfortunately, tracking is one of those features of typography that

is not standardized between various computerized text layout

engines. (And tracking and kerning are often confused.) See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28typography%

29#Varying_systems_of_letter-spacing

 

Therefore, I can't give you an exact formula for translating tracking

values between QuarkXPress and FusionPro because they both calculate

tracking differently, and I don't have access to Quark's internal

tracking algorithm. Nor do I have access to Adobe's tracking

algorithm for InDesign. The only thing I could do to come up with an

approximate translation is to fiddle with the settings in both

applications, but you should be be able to do that yourself.

 

If you want all of the text in your FusionPro output to look exactly

the same in terms of typographical details such as tracking, word

spacing, and leading, then my recommendation is to export all the

text frames from your QuarkXPress or InDesign template as variable

and let FusionPro compose everything.

 

P.S. Also, it probably depends on the font. Most fonts are designed to work optimally at normal tracking. You might want to try turning off kerning for the paragraph in question in the Paragraph option of the Variable Text Frame properties.

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  • 1 year later...

"Tabular Lining" does not as much refer to the "tracking or kerning" of a font but how the number characters of a font are displayed with respect to their alignment on the baseline and sizing. Many OpenType fonts contain more characters options than the normal "lower ASCII 255" that are used by most programs. Look at a font such as "NeutraText" or "FreightMicro Pro" and you will notice that half of the "default" numbers are actually below the baseline while the remaining numbers that are on the baseline are sometimes slightly smaller than the rest. These can be changed to appear equally sized and aligned along the baseline by using Tabular Lining settings within programs such as InDesign and Quark. Although I haven't found anything online about it, I do believe that these "Tabular Lined" numbers are included in the OpenType font set, just beyond the normal 255.

 

I too have a number of clients that like the look of the "old style" fonts for the lettering but not the jumbled look of the numbers. Currently I have to tell the customers that we cannot use the Tabular Lining effect that most page-layout programs offer but that I can attempt to match the font with a different font that "looks similar" when I need to display numbers.

 

It would be great if I could just simply use the font like it is supposed to be used instead of having to "fake it".

.

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In most fonts, all numbers have the same widths. If I typeset several lines of numbers in the same font and point size in FusionPro, all the numbers line up perfectly, even the "1" digits. If you're getting a different result, please collect up a sample job which demonstrates the problem and either post it here or send it to Support.
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I too have a number of clients that like the look of the "old style" fonts for the lettering but not the jumbled look of the numbers. Currently I have to tell the customers that we cannot use the Tabular Lining effect that most page-layout programs offer but that I can attempt to match the font with a different font that "looks similar" when I need to display numbers.

I have this issue with TheSans where several numbers descend below the baseline by default. Fortunately the family also offers TheSans Expert with numbers that fall on the baseline. I just have to remember to use a mix of fonts within the family to get around the "natural baseline" of some styles.

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I don't believe the OP was talking about spacing at all but rather the inability to choose the alternate numerical styles that extended Open Type offers. Please see the screen shot from InDesign which demonstrates Minion Pro's extended numerals.

 

Currently with FusionPro there is no way to access these extended characters through the text editor. I would imagine you could probably set up a JavaScript function to replace the default numerals with the unicode values of the number characters wanted.

opentype-numerical-options.jpg.911b97baabe392dbe3ee18df3b55fada.jpg

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I don't believe the OP was talking about spacing at all but rather the inability to choose the alternate numerical styles that extended Open Type offers.

I think you're correct that we've been talking about several different things in this thread, of which possibly none are exactly the same thing to which the original post was referring.

 

However, Marcel (the OP) did specifically mention spacing:

In Indesign they change the opentypefont option " Tabular Lining"

so that the numbers use equal spacing and the result is aligned.

I was merely pointing out that numbers within the same character set pretty much always use "equal spacing," regardless of whether a different set of numeric characters is accessed. I also still do not understand his comment about the "1" taking up less space.

Please see the screen shot from InDesign which demonstrates Minion Pro's extended numerals.
The screenshot from InDesign is helpful. However, what would be much more helpful in terms of getting everyone, especially me, on the same page, would be a screenshot from the OP highlighting what the output is from FusionPro now, along with an explanation of exactly what the desired output should be and how it's different.

Currently with FusionPro there is no way to access these extended characters through the text editor. I would imagine you could probably set up a JavaScript function to replace the default numerals with the unicode values of the number characters wanted.

Yes. These are all glyphs in the font, which should be available as Unicode characters.

It would be great if I could just simply use the font like it is supposed to be used instead of having to "fake it".

It would be great if there were one universally accepted idea of exactly how a font is supposed to work and how text is supposed to be typeset. However, there is no such gold standard, and in any case, we can never attain 100 percent conformance with all the varied typesetting capabilities of InDesign, QuarkXPress, or any other page layout tool. All we can do is try to find a happy medium (and maintain backward compatibility for existing jobs).

 

That said, we have talked about enhancing FusionPro to be able to access some of these extended font attributes. These are major changes to the architecture, though, and have huge impacts all the way from the typesetter itself, out to the tagged markup parser, the text editor, and even to MarcomCentral and other web-based systems and APIs.

Edited by Dan Korn
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  • 11 months later...
Although I haven't found anything online about it, I do believe that these "Tabular Lined" numbers are included in the OpenType font set, just beyond the normal 255.

 

I would imagine you could probably set up a JavaScript function to replace the default numerals with the unicode values of the number characters wanted.

 

Yes. These are all glyphs in the font, which should be available as Unicode characters.

 

We were all wrong.

 

It turns out that there are no alternate code points for "old style" versus "lining" numbers defined in the Unicode standard, and while a few fonts may contain alternate glyphs, most do not, nor is there any standard way to encode them.

 

Although I'm not sure this article is completely accurate, it does seem to support my conclusion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures#History

 

But I figured this out empirically, but playing around with InDesign and seeing what it does when numbers are changed from "old style" to "lining," or vice-versa. What it's actually doing is conjuring up new glyphs for numeric characters and putting them into the font embedded in its EPS or PDF output.

 

Further explanation here:

http://forums.pti.com/showpost.php?p=13040&postcount=8

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Here's a link to Adobe's glyph list. The oldstyle numerals start at F730 in the unicode private use range.

 

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/opentype/glyphlist.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_(Unicode)

 

If you search the list for the F730 you'll find the values for zerooldstyle;F730, oneoldstyle;F731, etc.

 

For Adobe "Pro" fonts like Myriad Pro, Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, etc, these unique character sets do exist within the font and are not distorted versions of the standard set. You can see them if you open the font in an editor or even in Windows Character Map.

 

Just doing some testing with FusionPro (with limit to latin off and asian support on), I can't seem to get any unicode characters within the private use range to render. If FusionPro can somehow access this range then it seems like it would be possible to write a function to replace lining figures with oldstyle, at least with Adobe Pro fonts or other type foundries that follow the same glyph list and definitely have the characters in the font.

 

I'm curious if I am not setting something up right or if FusionPro simply doesn't access that part of unicode, ie, Chr(63280) for an oldstyle zero using Myriad Pro.

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Here's a link to Adobe's glyph list. The oldstyle numerals start at F730 in the unicode private use range.

 

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/opentype/glyphlist.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_(Unicode)

 

If you search the list for the F730 you'll find the values for zerooldstyle;F730, oneoldstyle;F731, etc.

 

For Adobe "Pro" fonts like Myriad Pro, Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion Pro, etc, these unique character sets do exist within the font and are not distorted versions of the standard set. You can see them if you open the font in an editor or even in Windows Character Map.

Thanks for the explanation. However, that's just Adobe's own convention. Those code points are not part of the Unicode or Open Type standards. They point to those glyphs only in a few Adobe fonts. That's why that range is called "private use," because the font designer can put anything he or she wants in there, but it's outside of any standard encoding.

 

InDesign does seem to use the "private use" characters for some fonts, but for other fonts with "old-style" numbers and no alternates in the private use area, when you select "Tabular Lining" or "Proportional Lining," InDesign does indeed distort the glyphs to conjure up new ones, as it does for the Candara font in this picture:

http://forums.pti.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=856&stc=1&d=1369412625

 

You can see that in the case of Minion Pro, the Adobe font, InDesign uses actual glyphs from the font for the alternate number style. But in the case of the non-Adobe font, Candara, there are no alternate numbers in the private use range, so it stretches and offsets the existing glyphs. You can see this if you export to EPS or PDF and look at how it encodes the fonts.

 

This second case is more relevant to the question in the original post, which was about fonts which only contain old-style number glyphs. That's where InDesign modifies the glyphs instead of using glyphs already established in the font.

Just doing some testing with FusionPro (with limit to latin off and asian support on), I can't seem to get any unicode characters within the private use range to render. If FusionPro can somehow access this range then it seems like it would be possible to write a function to replace lining figures with oldstyle, at least with Adobe Pro fonts or other type foundries that follow the same glyph list and definitely have the characters in the font.

 

I'm curious if I am not setting something up right or if FusionPro simply doesn't access that part of unicode, ie, Chr(63280) for an oldstyle zero using Myriad Pro.

You can access any code point in the UCS-2 (0 to FFFF/65536) range with FusionPro. There are several ways to do it:

 

  • Type or paste the character directly into the Variable Text Editor. (You can copy-and-paste from the Character Map on Windows or the Character Palette on Mac, or use keyboard shortcuts.)
  • Put the character in a Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16) input data file.
  • Use <unicode> tags with the character code in hexadecimal , like so:
    <unicode>F730</unicode>
  • Use numeric entities, either with decimal or hexadecimal numbers, like so:

    &#63280;

The other caveat is that you need to go to the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings dialog and make sure that the "Limit processing to Latin-1/Mac Roman text" box is NOT checked.

 

Now, calling out Unicode characters (code points over 255) with the Chr function in JavaScript does not work in currently released versions of FusionPro, because the interface between the JavaScript engine and FusionPro is currently 8-bit.

 

In an upcoming release of FusionPro, the JavaScript interface will be 16-bit, and you will be able to use the Chr function with any Unicode code point (up to 65535), as well as type any Unicode character directly into the JavaScript Rule Editor dialog in a string literal. (This is mainly to make things easier for users in Japan, China, and other Eastern-language speakers, but it applies to all Unicode characters.)

 

EDIT: As of FusionPro 9.3, the Chr function can take any 16-bit value, up to 0xFFFF (65536), for any UTF-16 (UCS-2) Unicode character.

 

So, you are correct that, given certain specific fonts which contain alternate numeric character glyphs, it is certainly possible to use those in FusionPro. You can easily make a JavaScript rule to replace regular numbers with the old-style numbers in such fonts.

 

However, that doesn't help the original poster in this thread at all, as that person is using a non-Adobe font, which uses old-style numbers by default, and does not offer any alternate glyphs.

IDNumbers.jpg.8c95230c05b8b2b74c5781a57a1d5a5a.jpg

Edited by Dan Korn
Added note about Unicode support in Chr.
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