Need a way to locate "Unsupported character use"

[kenmcd]

48 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

And I wish I understood why the font substitution is occurring. I thought we should get the "undefined character" glyph, not substitution from some other font.

In word-processor apps like LibreOffice and Word, and many others, this was to help unsophisticated end-users.
But in an advanced application like APub, with very sophisticated users, this makes no sense at all.

In LibreOffice you can supposedly turn-off the silent replacements, in the Advanced settings, but it does not work.

Imagine trying to document absolutely everything about a font - including every character available.
And you would like to make a template to help you do this again, and again, with other fonts.
For fonts which support basic Latin, like old Type-1 conversions, you would have 256 characters.
Add Extended Latin blocks to add more languages - now we have a few hundred characters.
Add more scripts such as Cyrillic, and Extended Cyrillic, and an Indic script, and Thai, and Armenian, and Georgian, and Hebrew, etc., etc. - now we have a few thousand characters.
Now you make a template to handle all those characters - will take awhile, but you only do it once.

Now use the template with a new font.
If the missing characters were shown as .notdef this would be a visual process and would not be that bad.
But imagine if all the silent replacements are obscuring the actually supported characters.
Oh, but you can go through a list of unsupported characters. Right.
In reality you can delete whole blocks you know are not supported, but even that is a problem because single characters can be supported from other blocks (e.g. Greek, etc.).

This whole scenario would be much easier if I could just turn-off the stealth replacements, and see .notdef symbols.
And turn-off fake superscripts/subscripts, and fake small caps, etc., etc.
If the fakes were not there, the template text would immediately show what is and is not supported.

When documenting 100% of a font it is quite common to find errors in the font (which can then be fixed).
How do you know if an OpenType feature is working properly when the application is faking the feature, and you cannot turn it off?
How do you test the small caps feature when APub is faking the feature?
Often the errors are only one or two characters.

Currently trying to document fonts with APub is an error prone process (which is why I have not used it).

This is just one users' example of how these silent replacements are a giant PITA.

 

[sfriedberg]

6 hours ago, loukash said:

Works for me:

Mac or Windows?  Definitely does not work for me on Windows 7 or Windows 10.  When I select a font line in Font Manager and click "Locate", I get taken to the first occurence of the font, typically on a master page, and definitely not to any occurrence of unsupported character use.

[Added in edit]  Let me repeat.  Definitely does not work for me.  If it did work, I never would have opened this thread in the first place!

[loukash]

6 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

Mac or Windows? 

Mac, El Capitan

6 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

When I select a font line in Font Manager and click "Locate", I get taken to the first occurence of the font, typically on a master page, and definitely not to any occurrence of unsupported character use.

Alright, it seems that if such characters are also on a master page, the Locate function remains stuck in a loop on that master.
And that is the case even after all those characters on the master page have been fixed!

Definitely a bug here!

What works, however, is the "missing character" Preflight check.

1. create a Character Style with a compatible font for those characters (you may e.g. temporarily add a color or highlight to the style to keep track of the changes)
2. double-click the first instance in the Preflight panel, it's being selected on page
3. cmd-F to load it into the Find panel
4. copy the character into the Replace field, add the character style
5. Replace All; now… that may or may not work as expected and you may need to click and click as if it were just the "Replace" button; is it broken? a bug? don't know…

In any case, I was able to replace all instances and the Font Manager status is now "OK".

But it's definitely a clunky "feature", to put it very mildly.

[walt.farrell]

8 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

Mac or Windows?  Definitely does not work for me on Windows 7 or Windows 10.  When I select a font line in Font Manager and click "Locate", I get taken to the first occurence of the font, typically on a master page, and definitely not to any occurrence of unsupported character use.

[Added in edit]  Let me repeat.  Definitely does not work for me.  If it did work, I never would have opened this thread in the first place!

Works for me on Win 10, too. If I select a font line in Font Manager that has the "Unsupported Character Use" message, Locate moves through the document finding only the unsupported characters. However, I did not have any of those characters on a Master Page, so that may be the difference.

[sfriedberg]

With the exception of the page number field, the section name field, and some definitely-just-Latin1 characters, I don't have any text on my master pages.  But "Locate" from Font Manager takes me to a master page consistently, when I choose a Font Manager line with "Unsupported character use" and hit "Locate".

So, to summarize (I am really done with this topic):

1. Relevant documentation could be significantly improved at truly minimal cost.  Add just one sentence!
2. The silent glyph substitutions are not beneficial, in the main, and should be turned off.  Or make it an option for the user to turn it off.  The places where a glyph is currently substituted should be highlighted.
3. Preflight successfully locates the unsupported character occurrences under the label "Missing glyph".
4. Sufficiently contorted regular expressions, together with a good knowledge of likely font errors, may locate the unsupported character occurrences.
5. There is some evidence of a bug, not occurring for all users on all OSes, in Font Manager Locate w.r.t. the unsupported character occurrences.

[eluengo]

On 4/27/2021 at 7:07 PM, sfriedberg said:

"...my problem is not that I cannot find the proper glyphs.   I chose some glyphs (actually, Unicode code points), then inadvertently applied a style to them which specifies a font in which those glyphs (again, actually Unicode code points) are unsupported.  I now face the problem of locating all those characters so I can reapply the correct style to them..."

I had same problem.
I located those problematic glyphs through the "preflight" panel, double-clicking the line that marks the error.

Maybe this help u !?

Emilio

[sfriedberg]

5 hours ago, eluengo said:

Maybe this help u !?

Please see our discussion from 28 April.  Yes, it does.