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Discretionary Ligatures


seymoujd

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I am moving this from a thread i posted in earlier to start it as a new question.

 

We have started using a font in Indesign Called Chartwell that lets us easily create and edit charts directly in Indesign. Here is a link to a video about it.

 

http://www.lynda.com/articles/indesigns-secrets-building-graphs-with-the-chartwell-font

 

Basically you can type in your percentages, select your text and turn on "Discretionary Ligatures" in the Character Palette's Open Type settings. This converts your numbers to a chart. Is there a way to get Fusion Pro to respond the same way to convert numbers to graphs using this font?

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I have tried to use this font in the same way in FusionPro and haven't been able to get it work the same way as it does in Indesign. In Indesign when Discretionary Ligatures are enabled it interprets "25+25+50" as a pie chart with two 25% slices and a 50% slice. Is there a way that i could get FusionPro to act in the same way?
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I have tried to use this font in the same way in FusionPro and haven't been able to get it work the same way as it does in Indesign. In Indesign when Discretionary Ligatures are enabled it interprets "25+25+50" as a pie chart with two 25% slices and a 50% slice. Is there a way that i could get FusionPro to act in the same way?

It's really hard to say without at least being able to look at the font. But then, someone else would have to purchase it to be able to do that. (And please don't post it here.)

 

That said, I do know that InDesign can access some alternate glyphs from Open Type fonts. There are several other threads on this forum talking about that, mostly in the context of typesetting alternate representations of numbers such as "old style":

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?t=1523

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?t=4049

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?t=3423

http://forums.pti.com/showthread.php?t=4099

 

However, I suspect that, in this case, InDesign isn't actually using alternate glyphs; rather, it's simply accessing different Unicode characters (code points) for ligatures. If that's the case, then you should be able to call out those same code points in the font from FusionPro, either by inserting characters with those code points in the Text Editor (possibly by copy-and-pasting them from the Character Map on Windows or the Special Characters palette on Mac), or by using numeric markup entities (in hex such as  or in decimal such as ), or by calling the Chr function in a JavaScript rule.

 

The trick, then, is figuring out which actual Unicode characters InDesign and the font are using for each glyph. Again, though, that would require a bit of trial-and-error and some reverse engineering, such as exporting PDFs from InDesign and examining them in a text editor. And, of course, that would require having the font.

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