Mellel doesn't support glyph variant

gidelve · Post by **gidelve** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 7:18 am

I have installed Garamond Premier Pro in my iMac G4 equipped with Tiger 10.4.8. All works fine with Garamond premier pro, but not the classical greek capitals with diacritics such as oxia, dasia and so on. I get the info "The application in use (Mellel and Word also) doesn't support glyph variant" and so I cannot use the above mentioned capitals. Is a problem of the applications or related to Mac Os X?
Any tip or suggest?

Thank you so much

Giorgio (from Italy, excuse my english)

beneficus · Post by **beneficus** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 11:46 am

Mellel does not support glyph variants through the systems palette . If you want diacritics in your capitals (in Garamond Premier Pro), you have to choose your text and from the "Character Appearance" Palette, choose OpenType and check the "Contextual Alternates" feature. In this way every time you type a capital greek letter the accent will appear AS LONG AS you follow with small letters.
To be clear consider the pronoun "ostis" (=whoever)
the letter "O" alone (e.g. with a dasia and oxia) will NOT be displayed
if you type "O stis" you will NOT get diacritics
if you type "OSTIS" you will NOT get diacritcs
but
the word "Ostis" will be displayed with a dasia and an oxia provided you have selected the text and applied the Contextual Alternates feature.
Hope I helped... just tested it to make sure it works

gidelve · Post by **gidelve** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 6:37 pm

Thank you! The tip works fine! This was a problem/bug for which I had found a long discussion in Adobe Forum, but nobody has fixed it. Again thanks.

Giorgio

mkenney · Post by **mkenney** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 6:52 pm

I am sure that I am missing something here. I have used Adobe's Minion Pro and SIL's Gentium fonts with the SophoKeys keyboard (freeware, I think you can get it from SourceForge) and can get diacriticals with capitals with simple keystrokes. For example A + 1 + 4 = capital alpha with dasia oxia. So, perhaps you could download the SophoKeys keyboard and not need to go through the above steps.

rpcameron · Post by **rpcameron** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 7:30 pm

mkenney wrote:I am sure that I am missing something here. I have used Adobe's Minion Pro and SIL's Gentium fonts with the SophoKeys keyboard (freeware, I think you can get it from SourceForge) and can get diacriticals with capitals with simple keystrokes. For example A + 1 + 4 = capital alpha with dasia oxia. So, perhaps you could download the SophoKeys keyboard and not need to go through the above steps.

Some of this dependent on the level of OpenType support in the particular font. Both Minion Pro and Gentium have OpenType tables for Greek; perhaps the OP's font does not. Likewise, it may also determine whether the keyboard you are using uses combining diacritics or precomposed characters.

gidelve · Post by **gidelve** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 7:30 pm

The problem is strictly related to Garamond Premier Pro, doesn't affect Minion Pro and doesn't depend from keyboard layout. See this discussion:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@@.3bc0dd7d/0

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 11:34 pm

gidelve wrote:The problem is strictly related to Garamond Premier Pro, doesn't affect Minion Pro and doesn't depend from keyboard layout.

It’s not a problem of Garamond Premier Pro but a problem with Mellel. Mellel’s OpenType support doesn’t support all and every OpenType feature, as the mentioned Glyph variants. There are more fonts out there, that support multiple Glyphs per character. You could force Mellel to use most of those Glyphs with the contextual alternates (as beneficius has described above) or by selecting “stylistic alternates” (or the other options like Small Caps, Proportional numbers) but you don‘t have access to all Glyphs (the striked through zero, for examplevia). The OS X Glyph palette doesn’t work at all with those fonts which is another drawback.

I have posted a example some time ago made with Zapfino (an extreme example). You could see that there are some variants of the letter “p” available - but not in Mellel. It doesn’t matter if you try to use the OS X Zapfino (which is a dfont Font) or a OpenType version. Currently you couldn’t access those letters with Mellel and I hope a future version will change this.

gidelve · Post by **gidelve** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 7:11 am

Please, see this:

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx ... bc0dd7d/76

It seems a problem of GPP indeed.

Best regards,

Giorgio

Mart°n · Post by **Mart°n** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:53 am

Thanks for that information (I haven’t read the thread before). One never could stop to learn.
So in this case it’s a design flaw of AGPP but in InDesign you could even try to solve it by inserting the Glyphs by hand (not a nice job). In Mellel you couldn’t even do that do its lag of supporting glyph variants. This means that you’re catched from both sides and can’t get out of the trap.