Absolutely not. The way you "default" the figure style depends on the app. In Illustrator, it's done with the "OpenType" palate, while in InDesign, the best way to do it is by setting-up a paragraph style in the "Paragraph Styles" palate. You will find that these palates make the most of this and many other OpenType features.

Hi Jeff,

It may be you are not clear on the use of the OpenType menu. To change all the figures in a text (could be a whole book or document), select the text and change the figure style in the OpenType menu. All the figures will change to oldstyle. There is no need to hunt down figures and change them by hand. Try out other OpenType features that way. You can get small caps, fractions, etc. the same way.

Or, in InDesign, you can assign character and paragraph styles to text, so that if you did make all the figures oldstyle, you could just make a change to your character styles, and all the affected text would change, without you having to select it.

These tools are very powerful. InDesign with OpenType fonts will give you the best typography the design market has seen. But you have to learn a little.

Just to expand on this:

- if you want to change the default figure style in an Adobe application, select the appropriate formatting (e.g. proportional oldstyle) with no document open. All future new docs you start will have this formatting on by default.

- you can also set up character or paragraph styles in Illustrator and InDesign, which turn on this stuff. Or select text and turn it on manually on that text.

Cheers,

T