Fantastic news!

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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Let’s hope that activating these features flips the kerning switch to ON, or we’re all going to end up staring at some really godawful PowerPoint headlines.

The ability to embed PostScript-flavored OpenType fonts (.otf), even if print & preview only, would be even better. There are so many great fonts out there that I can't use because our contractual deliverables are Word documents.

Thanks, Thomas!
I hope the Mac version also gets it!

ChrisL

Gus: I was asking our friends at Microsoft for that feature, again. We'll see.

Dez: To be fervently wished for, to be sure!

T

>we’re all going to end up staring at some really godawful PowerPoint headlines.

As PowerPoint already applies TyueType kerning by default I would guess that they'll also support OT kerning in the future.

Cheers, Si

> As PowerPoint already applies TrueType kerning by default

I think you mean one can turn it on in PowerPoint 2007/2008... it's off by default, though.

T

Great news. 15 years late, and one a whole hierarchical level short.

Didn't anybody tell them? Didn't anybody see? Office users don't know how to use features. Features for such markets require bundling up to usefully selected and named sets of fully automatic features.

I told 'em this at the very first OT conference in Redmond, and said I would help. This is what one MS bright eye told me; "Don'na worry David we'll take carof everrrrrything." They have not even thought it out yet after 1.5 decades! Have a Happy Support Crisis.

Cheers!

Great news! Unfortunately, the Office 2010 Technical Preview doesn't work at my computer (XP), so I did not get the chance to test it. PowerPoint doesn't show any interface texts and Word crashes at startup. What a shame :(

Kind regards,
Martijn van Berkel

>Office users don’t know how to use features.

I don't resemble that remark.

In OpenType specification, in feautures registered also by Microsoft, is written that kerning and ligatures should be active by default.

In Office, this is not the case. Why is Microsoft not following its own “UI suggestions”?

Will it also recognize OpenType small caps (for fonts that have them) when someone selects the small caps checkbox in the regular font formatting options, or continue to auto-generate faux small caps as before?
_______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Gus, I surmise the Office users David refers to are not hanging on Typophile.

@Alessandro, thank you. I wasn't really offended, though; I should have used a tongue-in-cheek icon or something. As a matter of fact, I tend to agree with David; nobody should have to see the Word documents I get called to fix. Microsoft ought to consider some sort of "admin aide" version of Word -- maybe repackage WordPad with a fancy marketing name, like "Office Specialist Edition." Which of course it wouldn't be.

>In OpenType specification, in feautures registered also by Microsoft, is written that kerning and ligatures should be active by default.

In Office 2007 OpenType Kerning and Ligatures are not supported - so it's hard to follow guidelines if the features themselves are not supported.

>and said I would help.

The five most feared words in typographic feature interface design.

“In Office 2007 OpenType Kerning and Ligatures are not supported - so it’s hard to follow guidelines if the features themselves are not supported.”

True for Office 2007, but not for Office 2010.

Because it’s making these feautures on by default just a matter of minutes, I am asking myself for the reasons to actually turning them off.
There may still be bugs and in this case I hope they get fixed…or is it something else?

>The five most feared words in typographic feature interface design.
Let me guess... Simon, how should this work? :)

Cheers!

Will we get proper footnote figures? small caps?

@Gus: I know what you mean! Many of the authors whose manuscripts I see from day to day don't even seem to know how to break a page (carriage return, carriage return, carriage return...) or build a table (tab, tab, space, space, line tool...), let alone handle – or even notice – typographical niceties like kerning and ligatures...

Office users on Typophile, of course, do know how to use features. ;-D

Was there an answer to my question about small caps?
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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

As the OT functionality isn't actually working at all in the current "leaked" version of the app, it's not possible to check whether the old UI now activates the OT feature.

As MS has not officially released the technical preview yet, I doubt they are willing to comment, yet.

Regards,

T

> Was there an answer to my question about small caps?

I asked about small caps over on Chris' blog and his answer was,
No, Word 2010 doesn’t appear to support true small caps etc. If you select small caps in the Font dialog, Word 2010 just uses the shrunk down capitals formatting that Word has always used.

"Word 2010 just uses the shrunk down capitals formatting that Word has always used."

the deflating sound of a baloon oozing its last gasps of air follows...

ChrisL

Sounds useless, again.

Doh! [head slap]

Well, I'll still see the glass as at least half full. But yes, this does mean you still can't do basic decent typography in Word. (In my book, it requires three things: standard ligatures, oldstyle proportional figures, and real small caps.)

You should get in touch with the Office devs Thomas. They'd listen to you.

The Word OTL implementation is barely half-baked. Apart from the lack of proper smallcap and superscript support, in the current version it seems that contextual lookups are incorrectly handled.

The Publisher team, on the other hand, have done a serious amount of work implementing OTL features for the new version (some of it specifically in response to the Gabriola font, I'm pleased to report).

I must be missing something about Word and small caps. If you try to generate small caps from a font that doesn't have the glyphs, yes, Word simply scales the capitals. I don't see how you can blame Word if a font doesn't have small cap glyphs. But I've always been able to install the OSF & small cap version of a font (for instance, Linotype Times Ten) and get proper small caps. The same with superscripts and subscripts. Sure, it's a minor inconvenience to have to apply a different font in the middle of running text, but it does work.

OpenType was intended to solve the work-arounds you describe. So what Tom intended to say...

"In my book, it requires three things: standard OpenType-enabled ligatures, OpenType-enabled oldstyle proportional figures, and real OpenType-enabled small caps"

@Gus: yes, for fonts where these features are in separate files; but the point here was about fonts where they are OpenType features of the main font file.

[EDIT: cross-post with sii ;-D]
_______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Anyhoo, re Word: what Zev said.
re Publisher: good to hear, John, but how big's the user base really? [ahem]

@Dave, yes, in the online equivalent of esprit d'escalier, that struck me about a picosecond after hitting the post button. Oh well, perhaps OpenType small caps will be available through the insert symbol dialog. That is a real pain for more than a few characters.

Gus: Sure, it’s a minor inconvenience to have to apply a different font in the middle of running text, but it does work.

More than an inconvenience, since this mechanism also requires you to alter the text when smallcaps represent uppercase characters in order to display correctly using the lowercase-encoded smallcaps in the SC font.

off topic

Sigh. All this talk about goodies in Office 2010 is depressing when you consider that my college just installed Office 2007 on my computer yesterday.

Sii: Yes, exactly, OT-enabled versions of all.

Zevbiz: You said "You should get in touch with the Office devs Thomas. They’d listen to you." Unsurprisingly, I have been in touch, and have had a substantial email chat with the relevant PM at Microsoft. I can't really discuss it, except to say that all the OpenType UI/feature decisions are being made carefully and deliberately. It's not as if they just didn't talk to the right people or some such.

Gus: Insert Symbol will only work with encoded characters, not alternates, AFAIK. So it would potentially work (and presumably already did) with those fonts where the alternates are themselves given PUA codepoints, as Adobe used to do. Indeed, that was the main argument for such PUA encoding of glyphs properly left unencoded. But Adobe has abandoned that practice in recent fonts, and Microsoft and many others never used it in theirs, so with those fonts "Insert Symbol" probably won't help.

Cheers,

T

>@MS...all the OpenType UI/feature decisions are being made carefully and deliberately.

...made so carefully and deliberately in fact, that MS has reinvented the while.

>It’s not as if they just didn’t talk to the right people...

Do you really think that rationing out this technology feature-by-feature, application-by-application is even remotely going to work for that market?

Cheers!

[I was thinking if it was better to start a new thread, but finally I decided to revive this old one.]

So now that Office 2010 for PC and 2011 for Mac are already released, can anyone tell what are exactly the OT features supported in both versions? I wasn’t able to find a good answer on the web. Mainly interested in Word. Thanks in advance.

In Word 2011 for the Mac, the Advanced tab of the Font dialog box has three sections:

• Character Spacing
• Advanced typography
• Preview

The Advanced typography section has four drop-down lists and two check boxes. The drop-down lists (and choices) are:

• Ligitures (None, Standard Only, Standard and Contextual, Standard and Discretionary, Historical and Discretionary, All)
• Number spaciing (Default, Proportional, Tabular)
• Number forms (Default, Lining, Old-style)
• Stylistic sets (Default, 1 through 20)

The check boxes are:

• Use contextual alternates
• Enable TrueType typography features

Thank you, Gerald. Seems this is a good time for upgrading to the 2011 version.

Please, can anyone confirm that Word 2010 for PC offers the same OT capabilities?

Yes, I can confirm all of the above except for the last option ("enable TrueType typography features" – what is it for?). Here's a screenshot of the Word 2010 "advanced" font panel.

In the normal font panel there are also options for small caps, superiors and inferiors but sadly these are all synthesized, even when the font does contain these in OT features... :(

Oh, and by default *all* the OpenType features are disabled, including kerning and ligatures.

-Paul

Great, Paul. Thanks for the info. A client of mine is asking for a way to insert OT ligatures in Word, so finally there is a way!

> In the normal font panel there are also options for small caps, superiors and inferiors but sadly these are all synthesized, even when the font does contain these in OT features

Well, it is not a perfect world. I can survive without superiors and inferiors, but no real small caps is really sad. Hopefully in the next version…

Word is a turd and delivering it on a silver platter won't change that.

I have never, ever been able to grasp the model behind Word, or any other typical word processing program, for that matter. Never met anybody who has, either.
Something is very, very wrong when average people who have spent thousands of hours using an application are still befuddled by it.

Add Camel dung and old typewriter parts in equal measure, and you've got Word. And compared to alternatives, it's ridiculously overpriced.

Yet I've always found MS Publisher very, very easy to grasp.

For basic typewriter-style docs, I'm hoping an HTML based system takes hold, now that the specs - CSS 2.1, etc.. - are reliable and we don't need system fonts anymore.

If the pinheads who came up with the APA and MLA guidelines would allow for this stuff maybe there'd be something to talk about.

Grrrr......

Word is what it is (a bloated behemoth) and I only use it for testing purposes but it is a fact of life for millions of users at least for now or until it gets a visit from Jenny Craig;-).

@chris

>it is a fact of life for millions of users

Yeah, tell me about it! And it's certainly more like hundreds of millions of users.
But Google Docs is looking more tempting every day.

You can always get a job as a pizza delivery man!

You can always get a job as a pizza delivery man!
For the past hour, I've been trying to figure out what the frack you're talking about. I think I know now. Funny thing is, I *was* picking up a pizza! Happened in the parking lot.
Word.

Even if I'm using OpenType fonts with ligatures that I know work in CS5, my "Advanced typography" options are grayed out with every single font. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Ligatures in InDesign are a tricky thing. InDesign uses some of them even if there is no ligature OT feature in the fonts. What kind of OpenType-Fonts do you use, CFF oder TrueType-based?

What is the »Enable TrueType typography features« checkbox supposed to do? Is it AAT-related?

Trevor Baum, Sorry I don't have a specific answer. Nor do I have Word 2010. I assume you are using Word 2010 on Windows. Are you seeing this even with Microsoft's own fonts, like Cambria or Gabriola? Are you seeing this with a different text than the one shown, like lower case?

Under Word Options...Advance tab on the right....Layout Options toward the bottom....Is there a box to Disable Opentype Formatting Features?

A tangent, also read this post indicating a possible problem with Opentype CFF fonts and making a PDF.
http://typophile.com/node/72404