You can’t get at quite all of the glyphs in Photoshop 7, but you can get at most of them. If you go to http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype you can look at the OpenType User Guide (see links on right side of page). Go to the last page of the Guide. It has a table which will tell you which OpenType features are supported in which versions of each application, including Photoshop.

In Photoshop 5.5 you will only be able to get at the default forms for each character, none of the cool variants.

Given that you’re doing wedding invitations, you probably can’t wait too long, but other folks might consider delaying a bit, as Adobe has made public mention of a “Bickham Script Pro” in the works.

Regards,

T

Im not sure why you would be setting text in photoshop, should you not use something like Indesign? — or even Illustrator?

Alexis, I’d just like to say that Kyle is right, you’ll probably want InDesign or Illustrator for this project.

I run into this all the time. Because of its overwhelming mind-share Graphics=Photoshop to the vast majority. It’s not unusual and you may be forced to rely on Photoshop depending on your circumstance. If you must use Photoshop, then use version 7 as it’s easier to handle the text. Also if you must use Photoshop, consult with your printer about what kind of file they require in order to make a nice sharp result.

But I strongly advise InDesign or Illustrator for this work. InDesign is a page layout and typesetting application, which is after all, what you’re doing. Or find a designer to do this, using your type specification.

Of couse your wedding invitation may be a new media extravaganza in which case Photoshop could be a better choice…

Jon

It’s a beautiful day for confessoin, so I’ll admit this: in my early days of design and layout, I set simple type in Photoshop.

[Well, this thing is still letting me type, so I’ll continue with the story.]

I worked with a designer who was much older than I, the two of us working for the same clients (a college) but never on the same project (to his chagrin we were in the same room). I typically received the poster work and display pieces, while he worked on the longer brochures. I prided myself on my photoshop skills and loathed the type-sitter PageMaker that we were forced (at the gunpoint of no-pay) to use, since I was too lazy to learn about clipping paths and was in awe of the seemingly seamless unity that Photoshop offered our cranky bedfellows image and type. But day after day the mockery would float over from my partner’s desk, culminating in “You can’t set type in Photoshop” followed by some general cursing and mumbling as he got up to drain the coffee pot.

And for many many months (the legend will state with a nod and a wink) I labored under the illusion that Photoshop doesn’t rasterize the vectored type until the very end thus giving full control, and blah blah blah etc. I rationalized that I could kern any obvious monstrosities by rasterizing the text and scooting over carefully selected words (yes, the Scooting was as regal as that). I even pretended that I was pulling individual letter forms from a box and setting them on the page awaiting a final impression called Flatten. It was foolish, but fools need to operate long and hard until one day they buy InDesign.

It didn’t take me long to learn the error of my ways. Photoshop is still my darling, and she will always be a dear friend, but never again will she privy to my type-setting ways. And now that I think on it a little longer, I remember a string of painful days almost six years ago when I set my all-important wedding invitations and their fellow programs in some beastly little romantic upstart of a program called Photoshop. My wife still loves me and probably wouldn’t know the difference, so I suppose not all was lost. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I wonder if a little curse was not unleashed…

~h

Brian,
Very beautifully said. You are a man of words as well as letters.
:-)
I believe Mr. Thomas Phinney answered your post in another thread (the Golden Section thread).

Chris L

In a somewhat related topic, I recently discovered that Illustrator CS and Quark do not map the characters to the keys in the same way when using Mantinia. In fact, the only way I can access all of the offered glyphs in Illustrator CS is to copy them out of Quark. This is the PS1 version of the face, so I’m a bit confused about why the much newer Illustrator would seem to underperform compared to Quark.

My guilty typesetting app was Illustrator, the first ‘design’ app I’d ever used. I had a brief dalliance with Photoshop before shaking off the MS Word mindset and realizing that boxes for type is actually rather convenient.

Chris: Why not just open Illustrators Glyph Palette and “double-click” them in?

I’ll try that. Not sure why I didn’t.

But the thing is, these are characters that should be available by hitting Shift + Opt, nothing complex. They end up coming out as completely different characters that are mapped to other keystrokes. And those characters still work on their assigned keystrokes.