Typophile

Indesign CS2 = no OT palette offerred ?!

neumann

I have searched and searched, but to no avail. Can someone verify that Adobe InDesignCS, the newest, brightest star leading the way toward the opentype revolution, does not have a dedicated, always-open, opentype palette? The only two ways I've found to access and enable/disable OT features is by clicking one of two small (perhaps 10x10 pixel) interface do-dads on the measurement or character palettes, which then opens a self-closing 2-level-deep hierarchical menu of features.

Has anyone tried using this on a project with a requiring a lot of manual feature adjustments? IT IS A NIGHTMARE!!!!!!!!!

OK I just needed to rant or hopefully, find someone to tell me to shut up, calm down as they point out where the missing OT pallette is to be found.

Mark Simonson

I completely agree. Ideally, they should integrate the OpenType stuff with the existing type palette. It has a tack-things-on-as-we-think-of-them feel to it that I associate more with Quark.

They could at least do an OT palette like the one in Illustrator CS2.

Paul Dieterman


They could at least do an OT palette like the one in Illustrator CS2.

Or the one in Illustrator CS, or the one in Illustrator 10....

elena

It would be great to have shortcuts for activating/deactivating features...

Mark Simonson

Illustrator 10 doesn't have an OpenType palette, does it?

Tiffany Wardle

YES! I want this too!!

Mark Simonson

Here's a tip for InDesign, though: You do have access to OT features when you create style sheets. It works for either paragraph or character styles.

Paul Dieterman

You were right with you remark about Illustrator 10, Mark.
Guess it just seems to be an Illustrator feature for ages.

Paul

.

Hopefully CS3 will feature suite-wide consistency of typographic control. Presently, all of the applications have different type and OpenType feature handling.

I have posted screen grabs of the OT handling menus in the CS2 apps:
http://vllg.com/files/cs2/

I agree that a palette with clear OpenType control options is the best idea, Illustrator has this now, but it doesn't seem to support Stylistic Sets or other "third-level" features.

Mark Simonson

I've noticed, too, that in Illustrator it is not obvious how to get case-sensitive forms to appear (brackets, dashes, etc.). The trick is to use the "All Caps" choice from the pop-up on the character palette. Just typing or converting to all caps doesn't do it. InDesign does it when you click on the all caps button on the character palette.

.

Mark, that makes sense. Converting Case to caps changes the letters to UC, wheras hitting the Caps button makes an OpenType call which includes "case" and "cpsp", but leaves the glyphs alone.

Mark Simonson

It would be cool if it happened automatically--less confusing to the user. Maybe it could be an additional choice in the OT menu--"Case Sensitive Forms". Very likely, though, it would be too tricky to implement that way. I can imagine some ambiguous situations. For example: (Apple Computer UK) Do you use the parentheses designed for caps or lowercase? I would use the lowercase version in this case. The algorithm would have to look at more than adjacent characters.

Mark Simonson

Actually, a more sensible UI implementation would be: "Capital Forms". "Case Sensitive Forms" seems to imply some kind of automatic substitution.

Thomas Phinney

If you would like to see particular features or UI added to Adobe apps, you should request them: http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

Note that Adobe does pay close attention to what people request, and how many people request it.

Cheers,

T

Mark Simonson

No, that's okay. I just like to complain.

(I'm kidding. Thanks, Thomas. I just may do that.)

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