Has anyone noticed this bug in Mountain Lion’s OpenType support?

Matthew Butterick
Matthew Butterick Posts: 143
in Type Design Software
In Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, the support for OpenType features comes from the OS.

In Snow Leopard, the smcp and c2sc features were listed under Letter Case > Small Capitals and Letter Case > Small Capitals from Capitals. And they worked.

In Mountain Lion, these features are now called Lower Case > Small Capitals and Upper Case > Small Capitals. But they don't work.

This seems to be strictly a GUI bug, since a document made on Snow Leopard with smcp or c2sc will still show those features properly when opened on Mountain Lion. But the OT panel won't show them as being activated.

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Comments

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,734
    I get the same result. TextEdit works correctly, but the other Apple apps tend to lag behind on using the latest APIs.
  • Jeff Kellem
    Jeff Kellem Posts: 65
    Pages (and I assume the other iWork apps) don't actually use the Cocoa text system. They use their own thing. So, oddly enough, TextEdit ends up having better OpenType support. Frustrating. [This info came from an informal conversation with an Apple engineer earlier this year who also said “don't get me started.”]

    H&FJ also mention Small Caps not being supported in those apps in their OpenType support table: http://www.typography.com/ask-hfj/opentype/#otfchart-grid

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,734
    [This info came from an informal conversation with an Apple engineer earlier this year who also said “don't get me started.”]
    Same here, but he didn't mention the part about those apps not using the Cocoa text system. Ugh.
  • Matthew Butterick
    Matthew Butterick Posts: 143
    Pages (and I assume the other iWork apps) don't actually use the Cocoa text system.
    Ah, then I stand corrected. On closer inspection, I see that my Mountain Lion laptop uses Pages 4.3, which requires OS X 10.7.4, and Snow Leopard still uses Pages 4.1.
    H&FJ also mention Small Caps not being supported
    Nor are they supported in MS Office. This is one of the reasons I put my small caps in separate fonts: so I can use them.

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