Typophile

OT - Multiple swash alternates

pablohoney77

Ok so I have a font with multiple swash alternates and I can't figure out how to make both of them available in InDesign. For example, I have A.swsh and A.swsh02. Originaly i had the swsh feature set up so that it would "sub A from [A.swsh A.swsh02]" And that only gives me the first alternate, the second shows up in the glyph pallette, but will not insert, I only get the first. Then I tried setting up the swsh feature so that it would "sub A by A.swsh" and the salt feature so that it would "sub A.swsh by A.swsh02" but when i did this, I would only get the regular A when i selected the A.swsh02 glyph from the pallette. Is there any way to get it to do what i want? maybe it's in the glyph naming? Any help would be appreciated. Thnx.

‹ type in photoshop argument spacing & kerning classes ›
John Hudson

You have run up against two limitations in InDesign: there is no support for one-to-one-of-many substitutions, and there is no support for the <salt> feature. In your situation I would make the subsitution as you originally had it

sub A from [A.swsh A.swsh02]

because this will make the font ready to work in future, when one-to-one-of-many substitutions are supported. For now, you will have to rely on the glyph pallette to access the second set of swashes. You could hijack another feature, of course, but I don't recommend this.

Thomas Phinney

What John said.

My only other route would be, if you have a whole bunch of .swsh02 alternates for different letters, and these share something in common, it would make sense to use the "stylistic sets" feature instead. So you'd have a default swash, and then use 'ss01' on top of that to access the alternate swashes. Or 'ss02' for a different set of alternate swashes. (All assuming that there was something that these swashes had in common.)

T

pablohoney77

Yay, I got it to work! (I couldn't access the alternates through the glyph pallette the way I had them set up before. The glyph would show in the pallette, but not insert) I set the swsh feature so that it would "sub A by A.swsh" and then set the salt feature so that it would "sub A from [A.swsh A.swsh02]. I Thought of making a stylistic set, but I don't know how to access them in InDesign CS (is it possible?)

paul d hunt

I Thought of making a stylistic set, but I don’t know how to access them in InDesign CS (is it possible?)

Only in CS2 applications.

Captured from web.archive.org on 8 Aug 2007. view this capture