Ordinals in Garamond Pro

[Martin S Taylor]

I'm having trouble getting Ordinals to work properly. In my chosen font (Garamond Pro) , if I type a phrase like "19th Century", the t of '19th' appears as superscript, but the h doesn't. In Times New Roman the superscript goes very weird, as you can see from the screenshot.

For what it's worth, "Superscript ordinals as they are typed" (in Settings) is switched off, but "Ordinals" (in the Character Palette), is on.

Martin S Taylor

Sonoma 14.0; Publisher 2.2.0

[walt.farrell]

Most fonts have only a limited number of characters they supply as either Ordinals or as Superscript.

For Ordinals, it is common (I think) to have 1, 2, 3 and possibly 0 but not other digits.

For Superscripts it is common to have a, o, and t.

If the font you want to use does not provide the characters you need, you can either:

• Choose a different font; or
• Use phony superscripts instead of true superscripts.

In the Character panel, the options I have circled in Typography use the true characters, but only if the font supplies them. The option I have circled in Positioning and Transform enables faux super- or subscripts, which will work with any characters.

You probably also need to make sure that you only apply those settings to the characters that you need to affect. You can't really set them for a complete sentence or paragraph (or word, in some cases) as you may get unexpected results.

[Martin S Taylor]

Aha! Thank you. It was the option "Superscript ordinals as they are typed" which confused me. It seems that this option forces faux-superscripts in appropriate places. Thus when I type "18th", it uses the faux-superscript 'th'. But If I select the option under typography, I get weird results because Garamond has a 'proper' superscript 't' but not a superscript 'h'.

Martin

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for that added info, Martin.

(I had forgotten about that option, in fact.)