OpenType Small Caps Glitches
David wrote up a great post the other day about how to use Nested Styles with a non-OpenType font so that any numbers in the text use a different typeface automatically — an expert set of Small Caps that’s part of the same typeface family. Toward the end of the post he said, “Now, I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t also add that it may just be time to upgrade your fonts to OpenType versions, which may have expert or SC fonts built in. That’s so much easier to deal with!”
So true; but it reminded me that for some unlucky people, OpenType Small Caps can turn nasty, at the most inopportune times.
The Silent Substitution
At least once every couple months I get an e-mail from a client asking if I know why they’re having trouble printing certain characters in their InDesign documents. Things always look fine on-screen, and maybe they print out fine on their local printer or in a PDF, or not (the symptoms vary); but at some point — usually when money is on the line, like at the printer’s — certain characters simply don’t appear in the printout, there’s just white space or gibberish where glyphs should be.
It’s perplexing to me that the issue often boils down to the Small Caps substitution that OpenType typefaces (ones with built-in Small Caps glyphs) carry out behind the scenes, automatically.
If you select some text set in an OpenType face that has the special Small Caps glyphs — as most body text faces do — and turn on Small Caps from the Control panel or as part of the Paragraph or Character style…
… instead of scaling the characters down (per your Preferences settings) as it would for a Type 1 or TrueType face, InDesign replaces those selected glyphs with the small cap variants that are part of the OpenType typeface. (By the way, when applied to OpenType text, either of the two Small Caps choices in the dropdown menu above will pull from the SC glyphs in the font. So avoiding the one with OpenType in its name won’t help.)
These are the characters that drop out for the unlucky few. I’m saying it’s perplexing because the vast majority of users, including myself, never encounter a problem with OpenType small caps, they print just fine, and beautifully at that.
But when the occasional plea for help comes my way, I’ve learned it it almost always has something to do with variant glyphs in an OpenType font. The small caps issue is just the most commonly encountered instance, especially since a) It’s not obvious to the user that it’s happening; and b) There’s no way to disable it. (I’ve asked.)
If the hapless designer can’t buy a better office printer, or switch to a commercial printer with more compatible equipment; the only solution is to either use a Type 1 or True Type typeface, so that they get the scaled characters instead of the variant glyphs; or turn off Small Caps and scale uppercase text down by hand; or … horrors … convert the small caps glyphs to outlines. Blech, blech and blech!
Has this ever happened to you? Were you able to pinpoint the exact cause (e.g., an old RIP or something)? I’d love to hear about it.
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Would be interesting to know which fonts were involved or to have one of those PDFs, to see what is going on.
It?s most likely an encoding problem on the printer?s side.
In the PDF the characters are accessed by a glyph name. For alternate characters (discretionary ligatures, small caps, swash characters and so on) there is no consistent name reserved. It can be »A.alt1«, »A.alternate« or whatever. Seems like those printers can?t access those glyphs and only accept standard 8 bit encodings.
Anne-Marie,
I think I’ve seen this discussed in the U2U forum. If memory serves, its cause can be traced to subsetting fonts on printing. InDesign doesn’t know about the behind the scenes glyph substituting and so it sends the wrong subset.
Of course, there might be other reasons.
Dave
I seem to remember seeing this reported on the U2U forum and selecting download PPD fonts when printing or electing to fully embed fonts when exporting a PDF was a fairly reliable fix.
So something to do with subsetting, eh … makes sense! I’ll riffle through the old e-mails and see if I can follow-up with the questioners.
This has happened in my office, and I figured out a quick-and-dirty solution. We assumed the problem was our RIP software, but now that I see this post, I know it’s an Indesign/typeface format issue.
The best fix is rather than click the “Small Caps” button to force a Small Caps on a typeface without an actual small caps, we take a full cap and scale by 70% vertically and horizontally. This is what Indesign does anyway to force a small cap (check your preferences, you can set it to whatever you want). I’ve heard from a lot of designers that 80% is better visually, but here at the office, the norm is 70%.
Hope this all works for you.
Ole Kvern hates subsetting fonts when exporting PDF files from InDesign for print. He’s convinced that subsetting causes all kinds of problems like this (and global warming, and so on), so he sets the Subset Fonts percentage to 0% instead of 100%.
I totally agree with Bob that turning on “Download PPD Fonts” in the Graphics pane of the Print dialog box is also important.
Anthony, I do believe it’s a RIP issue. As I said in the post, only a very small percentage of ID users (in my experience) ever have a problem with OT Small Caps. Since we’re all using the same application, the difference has to be the output device.
And, entering text as all caps and then scaling them manually falls into my “blech” category of fixes … ;-)
I do wish, though, that there was a way to turn off the substitution and force ID to scale the OT characters as it does for T1 and TT characters. I’ve heard from other users who would like this option even though their OT SC print fine… because they need the SCs at a larger size, for a particular project, for example. They’re willing to trade off the beauty of the custom-cut SC for more control.
The only issue with subsetting is file size. Some of these fonts can really bloat a PDF. But that shouldn’t be an issue with a PDF heading to press. Fully embedding fonts is the safest way to avoid problems.
Speaking of turning off subsetting:
You need to check the EULA of your fonts. Nowadays most font vendors ONLY allow font embedding if you use subsetting, because a fully embedded font could be extracted from the PDF.
There is another work around to In-Design created pdf files that don’t print out the fonts correctly, or throw in strange characters (like bullets all over the place). You can open the pdf pages in illustrator, (more than likely you will get a message that says the font is missing but you know it isn’t), then replace what font it “thinks” is missing with the actual correct font that is in the file. Then save the file/page as pdf from illustrator. This will work with other issues that come up from In-Design created pdf files also. Or, if possible, export the pages as eps files instead (mostly for pre-press operators).
@breblin: I would be wary of that approach. Just because AI can open PDF files doesn’t mean that you’re always going to get the same thing coming out as going in. Illustrator is NOT a PDF editor. What you describe may work, especially for simple PDF files, but check the results carefully for changes.
Part of this must be an InDesign issue. We are using a font “Motter Corpus Std” regular (Adobe font folio font) and using small caps at 80% scaling. We recently upgraded from CS3 to CS5 and did a clean install of the fonts.
When this file is packaged, the packaged InDesign file reverts from small caps to lower case (though if you highlight the text it still shows in the palette as small caps but it clearly is not.)
This a really bad issue as small caps are a basic type setting tool.
Michael, I assume you also posted in the Adobe U2U forum based on the font.
This does appear to be a bug in the document fonts feature. The only workaround I can suggest right now is not packaging those fonts (or moving those fonts out of the document fonts folder) and make sure you report it to Adobe.
I’ve come across a related issue. I’ve opened a file that was created in 2017, and I’ve since upgraded to CC 2018. Within this file, some fonts are highlighted pink as missing/substituted. But it’s only the small caps characters. They don’t show up as missing in the Find Fonts dialog box either.
For example, I have a line of text that is completely Helvetica Neue (TT) Medium. The 2 spots that are small caps are highlighted in pink for being substituted. If I convert the entire line to Medium Italic or to Regular, there are no substitutions. I can’t figure out how to keep my medium small cap text. Anyone else having this trouble? This must be a 2018 glitch. Nothing else has changed since I last touched this file in December 2017.