One-to-many substitution

Hi there!

I want to create a font with glyphs which can be disassembled into its components in indesign to change the color of each component separately.

An A would appear as three bars, for example. You may now change the color of the bars as you like it, and by changing the kerning adjustment (in Indesign) from optical to metrical the A will appear merged as ONE.

It works in Glyphs as feature preview »Glyph Composition / decomposition«. But It doesn’t work in Indesign.

The single Bars of the A were named A1–A3. The kerning of the bars result in a merged A. Here is my ccmp-feature (I’am currently testing with A and T only):

lookup decompose {
sub A by A1 A2 A3;
sub T by T1 T2;
} decompose;

I’ve read the articles in this forum and several other articles concerning this topic.
But: I just don’t get it.

My InDesign version is 2017.0

Attached a scheme of what should be.

Thanks for helping!

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The problem is that text selection in InD is still character-based. Splitting one glyph into many glyphs does not create more characters.

What you could do is triple-type each letter (“hhheeellllllooo” instead of “hello”) and let a nested style simultaneously cycle through colors and fonts (or stylistic sets).would that be an option for you?

Thanks for the answer, mekkablue. So there is no way whatsoever that typing a single character result in the appearance of two or more glyphs (in InDesign)?

The only thing you can try is to use the technique shown in this tutorial: https://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/creating-a-layered-color-font

You can have multiple glyphs from one character. But you cannot select them separately and give them different colors in InDesign.

1 Like

One-to-many functionality is not well supported in Indesign. You have to activate the World-Ready Paragraph Composer. One could decompose ‘A’ into individual parts in the ccmp feature, no? I haven’t tested how selection work in that case, but I know this is not a viable solution online because you can only modify the colour of each character (before the ccmp feature is activated).

Isn’t there also a traditional Arabic writing style where diacritical marks are coloured?

Thank you all for your advises. I think I will try the layered color font.

How? It doesn’t work with my code: Strange feature behavier in Adobe apps