Black space character in InDesign: Ligature bug

Christoph Koeberlin

If you create a white on black font, you don’t want a gap between words, so you fill the space character with a black box.
InDesign, however, seems to (still) insert spaces on top of ligatures, and therefore destroys the ligatures with black boxes.

Has anybody figured out a solution to this?

The only workaround I found is leaving the space blank and inserting an calt feature exchanging space by (a black) space.alt.
This fixes InDesign but creates gaps in non OpenType-savvy applications.

Craig Eliason

What purpose does the white-on-black serve? Is that an effect that could be better accomplished in the layout program?

Christoph Koeberlin

That might have been the best solution, but the customer ordered it like that.

Georg Seifert

One solution I could think of would involves some context features that use glyphs with a wider background box that would overlap the space. 

And doing the same thing in a layout app might be tricky as you can see through the white spaces in the glyphs. There are some transparency settings in Indesign but they might not print well.

Russell McGorman

My Reo is a two layer font where the first layer is solid background and the second has stripes, including through the space. I 'solved' that with alternates. A space.salt glyph that's a solid black rectangle for the first layer and stripes for the second. As long as stylistic alternates are on, it works as it should. 

Frank Grießhammer

Investigating this internally.

Frank Grießhammer

Confirming that this is an issue in InDesign CC.
However, the issue no longer exists in InDesign CC 2014 (I am using version 10.2.0.69 to test this).

CC 2014:

CC:

Christoph Koeberlin

Thanks, Frank. Good to know.