Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Diacritics in InDesign for beginners


We have Turkish text that we have to layout Universe 65 Bold. This works for most letters, but not for ğ and a few others.
In Universe LT 45 Light it works.
Now, I went into Word to check out the characterset and neither Bold nor Light actually contains this letter. It is in Arial or in Times.
So we came up with the assumption, that it is a ligature.


And we did enable and disable Ligatures in InDesign for that section, but no change. Now we run out of ideas? What are we doing wrong or what did we miss? How can I create a character like this in InDesign for a new Font?



Answer



It's not a ligature, it's a character, which is why turning ligatures on and off won't help.


You should have the breve character (Unicode 02D8), though. You can create the character using a standard g and the breve, then kerning the breve back over the g. This is a general solution that works for any diacritics that are missing as full characters in a given font.


Set up a GREP style that looks for the g+breve combination and applies the appropriate kerning value (actually, in this case, you assign tracking). As they say in Facebook, "It's complicated."





  • Set up a Character Style that applies the appropriate tracking so that the breve sits directly over the g.




  • In your paragraph style, set up a GREP style with this code: g(?=˘) and applies your special Character Style.




Any time you now enter the g followed by a breve, the tracking will be applied automatically.


The code uses a Positive Lookahead (the "(?=˘)" part) to find a g followed by a ˘ then applies the Character Style. Geeky stuff, but a godsend when you need it.



No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...