Is there a way to tell InD to quit trying to make sense of type specimens?

Chris Lozos1 December 2010 · 17:39

I don't know what it is about alphabetical strings that InD hates. I have tried formatting the text with hyphenation, without, with every language, no language. What always happens is, I copy the entire character set from the fontLab "Quick Test as Opentype" menu selection and paste it into an Ind blank page. It is fine if you keep the type small but, gosh darn'it, sometimes we pesky old type designers want to see the type at 36 or 48, or, God Forbid! even 60 points and just let it float along breaking somewhere near the right margin without everything but the first line jumping in to that godforsaken place the red box in the bottom corner puts it! I just want it to wrap merrily along and, call me crazy, even be able to change fonts with the same text and not have it jump into "the red zone is for loading and unloading of glyphs only!" land.
Hopefully there is some simple command that is somewhere buried in InD to just turn its brain off and just flow the damn letters and get the hell out of the way!

I am not afraid to try this at home without a professional driver and a closed course.

Sorry for the rant,

If anybody knows the "Shoot the Paperclip guy" command for IND on a Mac I would be graciously thankful.

Chris

Here is a sample at 17pt which just gets to the end of the line so all is well:

Here is a sample at 18pt, one size larger, notice all type has vanished, the red box is there even though there is an entire page full of space left, and the red dot tells me I have an overset problem:

Mark Simonson1 December 2010 · 18:07

Maybe you could somehow insert spaces between every glyph, and then set the width of the space as close to zero as possible. That way, there would be a natural break between every glyph, and it would never try to hyphenate. (I haven't tried this myself, just an idea.)

Chris Lozos1 December 2010 · 18:16

The problem is that I don't think it should be such a pain tricking InD in to getting out of the way. It is not like this is one and done. I have to do it each time. I also don't want to change any spacing or kerning. The point of a specimen is that it looks just like the type without any manipulation.

Thanks for trying Mark. Don't mind me today, I have been grumpy ever since I started my Nutritionists "Healthy Diet" ;-)

blank1 December 2010 · 18:21

I feel your pain. Right now I’m proofing a font intended for use at p128 and up. Indesign is not happy about this.

Mark’s idea about spaces is intriguing. I bet that we could just use sed to insert an en space between every character. If we give the en space a width of 1 and just don’t include it in the final font this should work well.

Chris Lozos1 December 2010 · 18:26

The sad thing is that any simple word processor or text editor happily does it without even a whimper,

blank1 December 2010 · 18:47

Yeah, but I don’t think Word like being force-fed my half-finished fonts. The Indesign crew have turned it into a tank when it comes to screwed up fonts.

Mark Simonson1 December 2010 · 19:23

Actually, what I was thinking is that you can create a paragraph style in InDesign where, in the Justification settings, the minimum and desired wordspacing is "0%". I tried it and it works. The spaces collapse to zero, but still work as line-break opportunities. No need to create a temporary zero-space (or near-zero-space) character in the font.

The only trick is to insert a space between every glyph.

Stickley1 December 2010 · 19:20

I turn on hyphenation, set the text strings as I want, then put a return wherever a hyphen shows up. It works for any point size used up to two lines of text for a single run of letters, after which the breaks get spotty.

Igor Freiberger1 December 2010 · 19:29

Dezcom, although this is not exactly what you want, here is the solution I use (sorry for the screens in Portuguese):

1. With your text already set, do a GREP replace operation using the settings bellow. This will insert a hair space between each one of your characters.

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2. To avoid additional spacing, you can set a GREP style to be applied for every hair space. In this case, I just created a character style ("Space") and set it with a –25 tracking.
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I used a hair space instead of a regular one in order to apply negative tracking just for these situations. So the GREP style will preserve other spaces you use.
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These two steps can be automated. You can save the GREP replace command and reapply it to any text, while the styles with GREP can be imported from one ID publication to another.

Mark Simonson1 December 2010 · 19:33

Okay, I got it:

In InDesign, to insert a space between every glyph in the text, using GREP search, find "." and replace with "$0 " (dollar sign, zero, space).

Chris Lozos1 December 2010 · 20:24

Hey! Now I am gonna try that!!!!

Thank you one and all!!!

How many type designers does it take to outsmart the largest page design software on the planet?

Well let's see, Mark, James, Stickley, Igor? That's four--not too shabby ;-)

THANKS GUYS!

Chris Lozos1 December 2010 · 20:30

I would hope that Adobe would be able to come up with a "Turn offa thah Bubblzah" button on the next rev and maybe even do some other things to make it work better at the real work and put less time and money into the Pizzaz glitz the marketing guys love ;-)

blank1 December 2010 · 21:00

That is an excellent application of GREP, Igor. Thank you.