Glyph- and feature-based find and replace

[CmdrSpock]

I just started playing with the beta today, and I was stoked to find that Publisher already provides support for glyphs with no Unicode code point that aren't accessible via OpenType. I often use this specialized typeface, which has lots of alternates and specialty characters, but no OpenType features for accessing them. While I can select and insert them easily from the Glyph Browser, using them in a longer document is tedious, since there's no obvious way to replace every instance of a character with one of these alternate glyphs. The fastest way I've found is to replace them all with "G+[glyph code]" and then manually convert each one with Text > Toggle Unicode.

What would be useful here is a way to perform replacements using Unicode values and glyph numbers; e.g., "replace every instance of character X with glyph A". If memory serves, InDesign even allows you to combine this type of replacement with regular expressions. This is helpful for certain contextual alternates, like the R rotunda used in historical texts: "replace every instance of a lowercase R following a lowercase B, O, or P with this glyph". For OpenType-aware fonts, a feature-based "replacement" works as well ("find [a character in some environment] and enable stylistic set 2 for it").

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @CmdrSpock.

Have you tried:

1. Pasting one copy of your glyph into the text from the Glyph Browser.
2. Using your approach of G+something for all other occurrences.
3. Using Text > Find... or View > Studio > Find and Replace to open the Find panel.
4. Putting G+something into the Find box.
5. Copying the glyph from step 1 into the Replace box.
6. Press Find, then Replace All.

[CmdrSpock]

Hey, thank you for the welcome. I have tried copying and pasting the glyph into the Replace box. Nothing appears there. If I try to replace something anyway, it gets deleted (replaced with nothing, technically), confirming that there's nothing in the box.

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, CmdrSpock said:

Hey, thank you for the welcome. I have tried copying and pasting the glyph into the Replace box. Nothing appears there. If I try to replace something anyway, it gets deleted (replaced with nothing, technically), confirming that there's nothing in the box.

Interesting. Can you provide a sample .afpub file with some text and that glyph?

[CmdrSpock]

Sure. Here are both a sample file and a screenshot, so you can see what it should look like. The first lowercase Ж (in the word международный) is an alternate glyph with no Unicode code point, and the second (in the word женский) is U+0436 ("Cyrillic small letter zhe"). The default appearance of Ж here is the Bulgarian style, with a tall vertical stroke in the middle; the alternate glyph is the Russian style.

As an aside, you'll run into the "foreign characters displayed as Unicode values in the find panel" issue when trying to make replacements in Cyrillic text, but that issue has already been reported.

Sample file.afpub