OpenType variant glyphs not supported

[Paul M Norman]

I have run into a rather large snag and Adobe has been absolutely no help in resolving the problem.

I bought the Silentium Pro font set from Adobe about a week ago, The selling point was the beautiful array of extra glyphs in this font. Unfortunately, Adobe's ad copy for the font and Web site neglected to mention that the variant glyphs in the font are unavailable to Photoshop. Indeed, the oly applications that can handle them are InDesign and Acrobat.

I'm a Web designer and have virtually no use for InDesign. I am an owner of Photoshop CS which I do use extensively in my work.

All Adobe could offer was the 30 day trial version of InDesign. I have been able to create the text strings I need in that application, export them as JPEGs, read them into Photoshop or Fireworks and make GIFs out of them.

The site I am creating is done, but I'm up the creek when the InDesign demo expires.

Anybody have any words of wisdom?

[Ann_Shelbourne@adobeforums.com]

You need a Glyphs palette to reach more than the first 256 characters in a unicode font (which the OTF fonts are) because there are not enough keyboard combinations to reach more than that. (Silentium Pro's ligature for ffj is unicode character 00467 for example.)

Illustrator CS and InDesign CS have Glyphs palettes but so far Photoshop CS does not.

However OSX provides an alternative: its Character Palette.

Use that to bring the extended set of characters which are included in the new OTF Pro fonts into Photoshop. You can only use any of the OTF Pi fonts through a Glyphs or Character palette for the same reason.

[Paul M Norman]

Nice try, but the Character Palette provides no relief. I have tried that already. I guess I should have mentioned that.

If you click on a variant glyph in the Charactyer Palette in Photoshop, there is a warning message at the bottom of the palette: The current application does not support glyph variants. You can see the variant glyphs but cannot use them. Photoshop, as far as I'm concerned, is broken.

[Ann_Shelbourne@adobeforums.com]

Well, I don't know what you are doing, or which characters you are trying to reach, but i have just tried using Photoshop CS with the OSX Character palette with Silentium Pro and I could get the characters which I tried.

Otherwise just do it the type in Illustrator or InDesign; convert to outlines and take it from there.

Photoshop is not "broken" -- just get Apple to build you a keyboard with more keys!

[Paul M Norman]

Set your palette to "Glyph." Next, try to access the capital E that looks more like a Euro symbol (GID 509). You will get the same message I am getting (as noted above). Photoshop will not deal with the character, hence it is broken.

I spent a couple of hours over a period of two days on the phone with Adobe Tech Support and they confirmed the problem.

[Ann_Shelbourne@adobeforums.com]

You are right: that one you can't get via the OSX palette.

But you can reach it via Illustrator CS's Glyphs palette and copy/paste into Photoshop as either paths or pixels.

As you already have Photoshop, you qualify for the CS upgrade which you might want to consider.

[Paul M Norman]

Customer service at Adobe finally pointed me to a document that shows the deficiency in Photoshop CS. I hope I can save other the pain by posting it here:

<http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/otguide.pdf>

There's a chart at the end of the document that explains font support by application.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

The above link is broken.

Let's try this one:

<http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/OTGuide.pdf>

[Ramón_G_Castañeda@adobeforums.com]

Yep. That second link (post # 7) downloads the pdf file in question automatically to your computer.

[Paul M Norman]

Oops, sorry. Must be a Unix/Linux server.