Case sensitive forms in calt or case?

Nina Stössinger

Hi all,

I have read this older thread about including case sensitive forms of certain glyphs (that thread veered a bit off-topic, and my question is a bit tangential to it, so I’m starting a new thread); it got me wondering: Is it common practice to put case specific substitutions (like for parens, dashes) into the CASE feature? I worry that this approach would be pretty fragile, considering that many people may never actually use the CASE feature but just TYPE IN ALL-CAPS, which would then not trigger the substitutions.

How about a CALT feature instead that substitutes these glyphs if they have nothing but caps, punctuation and spaces around them (or; no lowercase). Does anyone do this? Thinking it might be a bit hairy to determine the exact permissible trigger sets, but if that can be worked out such an approach could be more bulletproof? Curious to hear opinions.

Chris Lozos

I do this with hyphens so that the hyphen height is determined by the preceding character's case.

kupfers

I remember there was a thread or discussion somewhere about the calt feature for this in relation to Apple’s new SF fonts and it raising the : between numerals. (Oh wait, it was on Twitter and Kai Bernau was in involved. I’ll try to find it.) I remember he came up with some pretty good examples why calt is not really a bullet proof way. But I agree that most people will never use the case feature either : /

Somewhere around this tweet it was 

https://twitter.com/kaibernau/status/612211078861352960

Nina Stössinger

Interesting, Indra, thanks. Yurgh, yeah, the up-and-down bouncing is no good – to be honest I had been thinking about just not doing case sensitive forms at all, but… but… at least the at seems almost compulsory.

Chris Lozos

Even though {case} is not used by everyone, perhaps it is used often by those who care most about their typography. Since type is no-longer only set by trained typographers, I think we must include the tools for those who would use them and hope we can educate the others who care to know?

Mark Simonson

The case feature is enabled when you apply the “all caps” style in InDesign (cmd/ctrl-K).

Paul van der Laan

The case feature is enabled when you apply the “all caps” style in InDesign (cmd/ctrl-K). 

True. But it isn’t applied when changing the text to all caps via the Type > Change Case > UPPERCASE option. And the same goes for the <cpsp> feature. How two different options that claim to do the same in InDesign produce such different results is beyond me.

attar

That’s not a problem, it’s up to the user to decide whether the composition justifies the use of case-sensitive forms. e.g. sometimes when you don’t use caps on the whole line you might want to leave it off

Mark Simonson

Well, using the change case option is like applying formatting to text (size, weight, etc.) directly instead of using style sheets. It's sort of the dumb way to do it. There may be use cases where it makes sense*, but generally, the "all caps" style is smarter and more flexible. It's right on the character format palette, whereas the convert option is in a submenu. Plus, it can be part of a style sheet.

* In the past, I've used the change-to-lowercase option to undo a client's gratuitous use of all caps text, for example.

Even if the text is entered in all caps, applying the all caps style will invoke the case feature. Of course you need to know it works that way to know to do it.

Thomas Phinney

“How two different options that claim to do the same in InDesign produce such different results is beyond me.”

They don't claim to do the same thing. That's why there are two different options. One of them formats text as uppercase. The other converts text to uppercase character codes. Generally the former is preferable, but occasionally the latter, depending on what one is doing.

Paul van der Laan

Thomas – technically you are correct. But from a UX point of view this kind of ambiguity should be avoided, don’t you think?

Nina Stössinger

I wonder if this is something the Adobe typography interface people have addressed. I’d bet (/hope) it is.

Nick Shinn

Gerben Dollen’s typeface Actium has a <calt> effect—“Smart Capo”—that changes consecutive capitals into small capitals.

I try to avoid being too clever with the <calt> feature, on the principle that when I’M the user, I hate it when software does my thinking for me, especially without letting me know.

I don’t provide cased alternate punctuation as much as I used to, as I have come to the conclusion it is not only largely unnecessary, but counter-productive. 

Not just for the bouncey-ness Chris identifies.

For instance, raising the hyphen after /E and /F makes it look as if it has just broken off from the middle stroke of those glyphs; the default low position provides better distinction/legibility.