After following the Cyrillic Small Caps thread below, I got
to wondering about OT support between applications.
For instance, Illustrator CS supports Stylistic Alternates
while InDesign CS doesn't. (they can be manually added
via the glyph pallete but it tends to be clunky compared
to the ease with which Illustrator CS can do it)
Any thoughts?
Since when does ID CS not support stylistic alternatives?
Hmm, I guess it doesn't. Unless I'm missing something. I thought it did.
Different groups with Adobe are responsible for defining the feature set of their apps. The <salt> feature is something of a peculiarity as it may be implemented with GSUB type 1 lookups (one-to-one) or type 3 lookups (one-to-one-of-many). Apparently the InDesign team decided not to support the feature at all until they are able to support the type 3 lookup, while the Illustrator team decided to provide support by treating the first enumerated glyph of a type 3 lookup as if it were a type 1 lookup. So Illustrator provides partial support for the <salt> feature (so, by the way, does InDesign Middle East).
After buying the new CS package I have to say I was
a little surprised by the way each program supports OT.
From a type designers standpoint the <salt> feature is
very helpful. Alternate letters are actually not that
uncommon so why not put them all into in a single file?
Old news of course, but what is the best way to do it
without leaving InDesign users out of the picture?
Captured from web.archive.org on 13 Jan 2008. view this capture