By: David Blatner
September 19 2007 • 11:29 PM
Why Is My Punctuation Floating High?
Diane wrote:
I have imported a Word doc into InDesign and had a glyph weirdness. When I chose Adobe Garamond Pro, all of my commas, periods and other punctuations turned into smaller and higher placed versions of themselves. But when I choose Garamond Premier Pro it doesn’t happen.
Floating punctuation is a classic problem having to do with the Fractions OpenType feature: When the Fractions feature is enabled, some OpenType fonts exhibit this behavior, and some don’t.
So check your paragraph style, your character style, or any local formatting that might be applied to the font. As we’ve said before we do not recommend leaving the Fraction feature on for all your text — just apply it to the text that really is a fraction. You can turn this on/off from the OpenType submenu, in the Character panel menu, or the Control panel menu:
fractionsproblem
Also, check our Guide to OpenType Fractions for more information.
There’s another, related problem. When using the ordinal open type selection with Garamond Premier Pro, it garbles the text. It does NOT create ordinals where it should (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) but superscripts every a and o in the story.
I found this problem first with CS2, but it does not seem to have been fixed with CS3. At least, the problem persists here. CS3 has lots of wonderful features, but it would have been nice if Adobe had fixed such a glaring and annoying bug.
On a totally unrelated note, I just got your Keyboard Shortcuts poster for CS3, and it rocks!
I’m glad you like the poster, Mitch!
That’s very interesting about the ordinals… it does work for the “a” and “o” ordinals used in some other languages. But it seems likely that this is a bug in the font, not InDesign. After all, the ordinals (st, nd, rd) work fine in Adobe Caslon Pro.
Well, it’s Sept 20th and I’ve just run into the “floating punctuation” problem for the first time, ha. Thank you so much David for writing this article! You’ve saved my nerves from being fried.
It must be a bug in a great many fonts, David. For a particularly impressive scramble, turn on ordinals in Hypatia Sans Pro or Minion Pro. Adobe Caslon and Adobe Garamond Pro work just fine, but well over a half dozen fonts, many of the most useful, bounce off into bizarro land if you turn on the ordinals feature.
It just seems like something so basic should work right. Open Type features don’t seem quite ready for primetime.
Thanks for this article. I just came across this issue with Garamond and thought it looked mighty odd. Whilst working through a tutorial today I turned on the Fractions setting in the OpenType options.
I’ve now turned it off again. Nice… all those floating commas and full stops have come back down to Earth again.
Thanks.
Jonathan