Also, should I use optical or metric kerning?

For Minion, Metric spacing.

hhp

Thanks Hrant.

That's what I had suspected. Also saves a lot of space in this document.

Cheers

Hmmm. Hold everything, then.
Are you using a small point size? If so, are you using the correct optical master? Because if you're setting a small size with an optical master for larger sizes* that would explain InDesign's optical spacing using up a lot more room than the Metric setting, but that would also mean it's preferable.

* Does the setting look cramped and anemic?

hhp

Hrant

I'm using Minion Pro Regular 9/12.
Section Heads � Frutiger bold 15/12
Subhead 1 - Frutiger bold 12/12
Subhead 2 � Frutiger bold 9/12
Subhead 3 � Minion Pro Bold italic 9/12
Footnotes � Minion Pro Caption 6/9

(All space befores are multiples of 3pts)

This is an extremely complicated document that I have inherited. The previous version has 7 levels of headings plus some inline headings. It also had 5 different bullet styles even though there were only two levels of bullets.

> Minion Pro Regular 9/12

And InDesign's optical spacing is loosening it up a lot? Strange.

hhp

You're applying ordinals globally, which you shouldn't be. Only format as ordinals the specific bits of text you want to have ordinals. (Same holds true for fractions, btw.)

T

Don't apply discretionary ligatures to ordinals... that's the problem with 1st. I'm not sure if Adobe could have built the fonts features in such a way as to avoid this, but it's easy to work around it.

As to "Notification", I'm not sure how that's happening. Check what Opentype features you have active, and deselect them until it's ok.

Thanks John and Thomas.

Ordinals are definitely the problem.

It's going to take a while finding all the ordinals to apply on a case by case basis with about 160pp. Any ideas on doing this? Is find and replace a good way to find the characters I'll need to change?

Thomas - If I took off discretionary ligatures would it be possible to apply the ordinals globally?

Thanks again everyone.

Nope. You'd still have the problem with "Notification." That's the "numero" kicking in.

By the way, the problem with the discretionary ligatures overriding the ordinals is a font bug, and could have been avoided by better feature construction. I filed the bug against the font, and hope to get it fixed in some future revision. Sorry about that.

Regards,

T