InDesign CS5 and OpenType language and script tags
Miguel Sousa
I'm starting to receive some questions about features not working in InDesign CS5 when a non-Latin language or "No Language" is selected. And this is happening with fonts that worked fine in CS3 and CS4.
From the cases I've seen, the bugs were in the fonts. More specifically, the feature file code lacked languagesystem declarations. Regarding InDesign CS5, what I can tell you is that this version is more strict than CS3 and CS4 were in terms of dealing with language and script tags. So if the fonts don't have lookups for all the necessary languagesystems, ID CS5 will just stick to what's in the font rather than creating them on-the-fly, like CS3 and CS4 used to do.
What does this mean? It means that you should check that, at a minimum(!), your feature code starts with these two lines:
languagesystem DFLT dflt;
languagesystem latn dflt;
The latn/dflt line ensures that the features (or more precisely, the lookups) are available under all Latin-based languages. (Even if you don't explicitly provide it, the FDK will create the lookups with this languagesystem anyway.)
The DFLT/dflt is also necessary. If you don't provide it, the features will not work when the user selects "No Language".
In addition to the above, if the font supports non-Latin languages (e.g. Greek, Cyrillic) you'll need to use the appropriate languagesystem declarations as well, such as:
languagesystem cyrl dflt;
languagesystem grek dflt;
For example, the features will not work when the user selects Russian as the language, if the font does not have the lookups registered under the languagesystem cyrl/dflt. (And I believe that applies to the 'kern' feature as well as the other.)
To get a complete list of script tags and language tags, please consult these pages,
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/scripttags.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/languagetags.htm
So, please check your fonts, and let me know if you have questions.
Thanks,
Miguel
Ben Kiel
> languagesystem DFLT dflt;
> languagesystem latn dflt;
Also, for those of you who don't know, FontLab 5 doesn't write the DFLT language system correctly into the OTFs it generates. It incorrectly reports that DFLT is depreciated, and the resulting font has four spaces " " instead of "DFLT" in the font. Using TTX, you can do a find/replace for " " to "DFLT" to fix this. Also, Adam Twardoch had a script to do this if you have FontTools installed. Script is here: http://www.silesian.com/software/FixDFLTScriptTagSL.zip, info about it is here: http://typophile.com/node/29469. There isn't a problem if one is using the FDK to generate your fonts.
Ben Kiel
http://www.houseind.com
Direct Dial: (302) 766-7593
Chris Lozos
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ChrisL
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