Indesign: display Devanagari half forms forms followed by space

James Puckett

I want to make proofs for Devanagari conjuncts that don’t rely on glyph id numbers. Is there a way to make Indesign render consonants + halant + space as a half-form?

James Puckett

Also, is this something I can control better in the ME version of Indesign?

Dave Crossland

https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/issues/388 might be relevant, so you can encode the normally-unencoded glyphs in a predictable way.

James Puckett

That’s a possibility, but it’s not entirely what I want. I often study fonts by printing my own proofs. Using the PUA for development fonts doesn’t allow me to do that.

Kent Lew

Obviously, consonant + halant (virama) + space is a valid form for ending words in many circumstances, so that sequence by itself will not trigger the {half} feature.

There is no exposed UI for toggling the {half} feature, but you could use a script to manually toggle the feature under the hood and thereby force InDesign to display any half forms mapped to consonant + halant in the {half} GSUB.

In AppleScript, the barest form would look like this:

tell application "Adobe InDesign CS6"
	tell selection to set OpenType features to {{"half", 1}}
end tell

Paste that into AppleScript Editor [don’t nobody snicker, now], save the script to your InDesign Scripts Panel, and apply to your consonant + halant sequence (make sure that one of the World-Ready composers is active, of course). You can map a custom Keyboard Shortcut to the script, to make application even easier if you want.

Again, that’s bare-bones code. See if that does what you want. You can refine as desired.

(You may need to edit that first tell statement to your version of InDesign, although in my experience older declarations usually work in newer versions and get automatically updated. Just not the other way around.)

Dave Crossland

I often study fonts by printing my own proofs. Using the PUA for development fonts doesn’t allow me to do that.

Why not re-encode them?

Jelle Bosma

In order to display half form followed by space: enter Consonant + virama + ZWJ (U+200D) + space.

James Puckett

Thanks, Jelle.

Kent Lew

Ah, ZWJ is the trigger. Good to know. Not the easiest char to enter, but does the trick.