1st 2nd 3rd 4th as Section Names

[Matt Healey]

Hi All,

I have set up a document in AP that contains a number of sections with names such as "1st Part of Training", "2nd Part of Training", etc. I have then places a field on Master A that contains a field called <section name>.  The idea being that I don't have to have a seperate title for each page, it's just pulled automatically from whatever section the page is in.

The problem is that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, text no longer goes into superscript like it would for a normal text box. 

Is there somewhere in a stylesheet that I can set this so it gets applied? I don't know what it's called when that happens so I don't know what to look for.

[John Rostron]

Is there some good reason for using 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rather than First, Second, Third and Fourth? These would normally be more appropriate in titles.

Your question about superscript is still a valid one though.

John

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[Matt Healey]

1 hour ago, John Rostron said:

Is there some good reason for using 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rather than First, Second, Third and Fourth? These would normally be more appropriate in titles.

Hi John, it's mostly because the numbers correspond to other parts of what we're trying to do.

[Matt Healey]

Thank you for that Lagarto, that seems to do the trick.

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[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

and have difficulties in picking the hard coded ordinal superscripts from the Affinity Glyphs panel,

That's because they're neither "ordinal" nor "superscripts" in the Unicode naming scheme. Ordinals are the raised "a" and raised "o".

The raised "s" and raised "t" you've used have the Unicode names MODIFIER LETTER SMALL S and MODIFIER LETTER SMALL T, respectively.

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[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

For Affinity ordinals do not seem to exist as a category at all so these glyphs need to be picked from Private Use Area.

Ordinals do exist. Affinity strictly uses the Unicode naming system. And in that system the only ordinal characters are ª and º.

The "b" and "d" that you have in that screenshot are U+1D47 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL B and U+1D48 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL D, not ordinals. InDesign is probably trying to be user-friendly, and not using the strictly correct glyph names.

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[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Ok, I see, so common sense and natural language (not to mentioned the industry standard in graphic design) are forbidden...

I don't think that anyone can really explain why the Unicode Consortium does things the way they do. Serif is merely going along with their standardized usage.

[Old Bruce]

24 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't think that anyone can really explain why the Unicode Consortium does things the way they do. Serif is merely going along with their standardized usage.

I used to think the consortium was doing good work, then they started using space for Emojis and I have serious concerns about the future.

[MikeW]

Any font maker can place any glyphs into the OT Ordinal feature. They may or may not code that feature well. There needs to be a distinction here between the OT Ordinal Feature and the Unicode Consortium's designation of what is/isn't UC-coded.

The fonts I make/code have all lowercase, etc., glyphs available for use in the ordinal feature, including the st, nd, rd, th pairings. Bhikkhu Pesala's fonts (OpenSource) do as well if I recall properly. Several Adobe fonts and other OpenSource fonts too. These likely do not depend on language, at least the majority of glyphs will not.

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[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Any font maker can place any glyphs into the OT Ordinal feature. They may or may not code that feature well. There needs to be a distinction here between the OT Ordinal Feature and the Unicode Consortium's designation of what is/isn't UC-coded.

Good points, Mike.

Additionally, for this specific topic, we need to consider that were talking about section names, which are a kind of field. In that context the user cannot select OT features.

[MikeW]

24 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Good points, Mike.

Additionally, for this specific topic, we need to consider that were talking about section names, which are a kind of field. In that context the user cannot select OT features.

Cannot the p.style be set for the section names? If they can, a font with a "proper" ordinal feature could be used to automatically set the ordinals.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, MikeW said:

Cannot the p.style be set for the section names? If they can, a font with a "proper" ordinal feature could be used to automatically set the ordinals.

Not for the section names directly. But if could be done for the text frame (or artistic text) in which the section name is embedded. Thanks for that idea, Mike.

(Note: I think this would require that the section names have no other "s" or "t" characters (or "n", "d", and "r"), unless the font is very clever. The usual Publisher "ordinal" feature in Typography will apply to all those characters, even ones not used as ordinals, in my experience.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[MikeW]

Hmm. So the variable cannot have a p.style applies to it and have that affect the formatting?

Sorry for the questions. I worked for nearly 3 straight days and vowed to leave the computer off today. 

fwiw, the ordinal feature I typically roll into the fonts I work on would/should work.

[walt.farrell]

23 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Hmm. So the variable cannot have a p.style applies to it and have that affect the formatting?

Sorry for the questions. I worked for nearly 3 straight days and vowed to leave the computer off today. 

fwiw, the ordinal feature I typically roll into the fonts I work on would/should work.

It could have a Character Text Style applied to the entire field (or a Paragraph Text Style applied to the complete paragraph the field is in).

The problem is that if you take a string of text in Publisher, assign a font to all of it, and enable the Ordinal feature in the Typography section of the Character Panel (or the corresponding setting in a Text Style), then in my experience all of the characters that have ordinal variants in that font will use them.

Thus, if the font has s, t, n, and d with ordinal variants, they will be used for all the s, t, n, and d characters in (for example):
 

1st and second

If the font's ordinals are controlled via contextual alternates it might work better.

[MikeW]

Right. I use contextual lookups (and other types) in the ordinal feature. So I would use such a font on the page for the p.style and for the section name variable. 

Next time I've got the computer up I'll post an example. 

[kenmcd]

4 hours ago, Lagarto said:

In Helvetica Now, brand new font by Monotype, the English ordinals are listed in InDesign under a category Superscript, so font designers have once again done something to try to be a bit more helpful than Unicode Consortium:

 So in software that is now about decade old, this kind of user-friendliness and font-awareness is used.

In Affinity apps, only the Unicode category Superscripts and Subscripts is supported, so the English ordinals are not listed:

But poor Latin-speaking world, they still need to look for their ordinals searching the Unicode terms: "Masculine ordinal indicator" and "Feminine ordinal indicator". InDesign though can show them if a or o is selected and then alternates for selection is searched. For Affinity users I guess it means browsing through the Private Use Area.

So, terminology I used (superscripts and ordinals) was not then totally erratic (in terms of font technology), but considering the forum, misleading.

Wow. This is kind of disturbing (what Affinity is doing).

InDesign is just listing the actual superscript characters included in the Helvetica Now OpenType code (as expected).
They are not adding the ordinals in here (from the ordinals OpenType code).
Helvetica Now only has the contextual a and o, and a ligature for "No." in the ordinals. That is all.

What is disturbing is that Affinity is only showing a selected sub-set of the superscripts available.
That is sure to confuse.
So the user has no way to discover that these are even available - except by closely examining 817 glyphs.
That's crazy.

Calibri has 97 characters in superscript - 0-9, A-Z, a-z, and some punctuation and math.
And 15 characters in subscript - 0-9 and some punctuation and math.
97 + 15 = 112
APub is showing a fraction of that - 42.
Ugh.
Cambria - same problem.
Palatino - same problem.

 

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[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, LibreTraining said:

Calibri has 97 characters in superscript - 0-9, A-Z, a-z, and some punctuation and math.
And 15 characters in subscript - 0-9 and some punctuation and math.
97 + 15 = 112
APub is showing a fraction of that - 42.

Affinity uses the Unicode definitions, and the Superscripts and Subscripts block in Unicode comprises characters in the range of U+2070 through U+209F. Calibri has 42 characters in that block according to the Unicode-based Character Map program I use, BabelMap.

Wikipedia explains that Unicode block here.

The remaining characters from Calibri should be there, but you'll need to search for them by name, or look in the proper Unicode block to see them, I think.