Glyph Positioning

With display type in all caps, the positioning of hyphens, dashes, and parentheses will require optical adjustment. Hyphens are centered on the x-height, which is appropriate for lowercase letters, but looks too low for text in all caps. Without OpenType fonts you would need to nudge up the hyphens, dashes, and parentheses using baseline shift. The beauty of OpenType fontsand InDesign's support of themis that this glyph positioning happens automatically.

If you format an OpenType font as All Caps, glyph shifting automatically adjusts the punctuation for a better fit: Hyphens, dashes, parentheses, braces, and brackets all shift vertically. Note, this only happens when you choose the All Caps character formats, not when you key in text with the Caps Lock key on.

Figure 7.17. Glyph Positioning.

Characters and Glyphs: What's the Difference?

Characters are the "names" or code points assigned by the Unicode standard. Glyphs are the actual design of a letterform. Characters are rendered by mapping Unicode characters to specific glyphs. One character may correspond to several glyphs: A lowercase e, a small caps e, and a swash e are all the same character, but are three separate glyphs.

Tip

How do you know if your font is an OpenType font? Well, if it's followed by the word "Pro" then chances are it is. InDesign CS2 ships with several OpenType fonts including Adobe Garamond Pro, Adobe Caslon Pro, Caflisch Pro, Minion Pro, and Warnock Pro.