We have a job in to typeset, the first in what will be a long series, the letters of Henry James. It turns out that the publisher wants to use a special ampersand in some places where James used “his” ampersand. While the publisher has not yet found money for an XML version of the book(s), It does seem likely, especially since the eventual publication of all the letters will run many years.

So while it is not hard to create and set the “special” ampersand, if I put it as such in the composition file, there will be a problem downstream.

I believe InDesign CS II does not support salt, which might be one way to typeset different ampersands, while retaining the general Unicode number for an ampersand.

The other way I can think of is to embed a “private use” character of zero width in the file before all the ampersands to be rendered with the special character, then use “contextual alternatives” to set the special ampersand in the book. From limited testing on another matter, the private use character will drop out in plain text, leaving just the call for the ampersand, so an XML file using any font will at least display an ampersand – though not, of course, James’ rendition.

Sill it bugs me to approach the matter this way. Anybody think of a better solution?

TIA