Use the Stylistic alternate button in the OpenType palette.

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Thanks guys but using the Stylistic Alternate button in the OpenType palette will only give me the first alternate. There are three ampersand alternates in total. I can see #2 and #3 in the glyphs but I can't insert them.

Could you possible have a different stylistic set activated that's overriding your choices?

Can you copy-paste from InDesign?

@Josh
Turned off all stylistic sets and still can't get it.

@Nina
I don't have InDesign on my 9to5 machine (Web Premium only). I'll try when I get home.

Thanks everyone!

On a side note, I've also experienced similar problems with a free OpenType font called Lavendria. I know you get what you pay for so I shouldn't complain about it and have learned my lesson. Basically the only lowercase /e/ that I could use was a swashed alternate even though I could see the normal /e/ in the glyph palette. I ended up inserted an /é/ every time I needed /e/ and deleted the accent. Painful.

Okay, I didn't get the problem from reading your original posting.

You don't need to »double-click« in the Glyph Palette. You click-and-hold on the base character (&), the fly-out menu appears revealing all the alternative characters for this base glyph. Then you just hover over the one you want and let go. The character will be inserted. I just tried it again using Arno Pro in Illustrator.

What version of Illustrator are you using? I’m going to guess CS5.

(And Ralf, I’m going to guess you’re using something different, probably CS5.5.)

I’m pretty sure there is a known bug in various CS5 apps such that they do not properly interpret GSUB Lookup Type 3, alternate substitutions. These are the ones that take the syntax “sub x from [x.alt x.alt2 x.alt3]”.

The app only substitutes the first in the list. Which is what Trevor is experiencing. I am able to duplicate his problem on my machine with Arno Pro and Illustrator CS5. (Other fonts, too.)

We experienced a similar bug with Richard Lipton’s Canto. We noticed it in InDesign, where the entire Swash feature doesn’t work in CS5 because of the presence of a few Type 3 lookups.

The OTL implementation in InDesign is a little different, so you can in fact insert the glyphs from the glyph palette. I believe that is because InDesign CS5 converts to GIDs when inserting from the glyph palette. (You can also insert the Arno Pro alt ampersands.)

But copying from InDesign and pasting back into Illustrator won’t help, because Illustrator doesn’t use the GID, instead relying on the feature — which is implemented incorrectly. So, basically there’s no way (that I have discovered) for Trevor to get the ampersand he wants from within Illustrator CS5.

Various attempts to alter the Canto OTL code to work around this caused it to not work as desired in other versions. So, in the end we decided to leave it, because the feature was in fact written to spec and this is essentially an Adobe bug of not implementing to spec.

Trevor, you can try scouring the Adobe support sites to see if there was an update release to fix this. I can’t swear that I’m using the absolute latest version.

I believe these issues are resolved in all CS5.5 versions. (But, of course, that’s an actual upgrade, not an update.)

Or go backwards. I believe previous versions also work fine. I know CS3 does. Never had CS4.

If it works in InDesign, type the character, convert to outlines, and copy to Illustrator.

(And Ralf, I’m going to guess you’re using something different, probably CS5.5.)

No, it's CS5 (Illu 15.0.2 on OS 10.7.3) and the alternative ampersands of Arno Pro are working as expected.

Okay, maybe this was fixed in 15.0.2. My version is 15.0.0.

Trevor should definitely check his version and look for the update.