[birdman]

I work for a music publisher, and use a font called Freebats to get the flat symbol in body text. I could use a music notation font, but it's annoying because I'd have to adjust the point size and baseline every time I use it (which means if I resize a group of text, I need to re-adjust the flats too). Back when I was using Quark and Freehand, it was a simple matter of typing option-b and setting the font to Freebats.

Now that I'm using InDesign, the same method produces the 'integral' symbol, apparently rendering it in the Symbol font. I seemed to recall an odd option in PageMaker that would use the Symbol font for non-text characters (I'm not sure why this feature would be useful, but whatever). With that in mind, I searched the help menu for 'symbol font' to see if InDesign had a similar option, and discovered the Glyphs panel.

With the Glyphs panel, I was able to hunt down the flat symbol, double click it, and voila! it inserted the character. Then I could copy the one I had inserted and paste it wherever else I needed it.

But I must ask... What is the purpose of this? If I select a font from the text toolbar, wouldn't it be rather obvious that I want to use the damn font??? If I wanted the Symbol font, I would've selected it! Since this is the default action (as was the one in PageMaker), I assume there's some advanced, professional-designers-always-do-it-this-way reason why. And how does it know to only do this with 'dingbat' fonts, and not, say, Georgia, which renders the option-b character (integral symbol) in Georgia?

I guess more importantly, is there a way to turn that 'feature' off so I don't have to use the Glyphs panel every time I want InDesign to do what I tell it to do?

-birdman

[Oisín]

The default American keyboard layout maps Option-B to U+222B, the Integral symbol (∫). If the font you’re currently using doesn’t contain any glyphs mapped to U+222B, InDesign will display the glyph in the first default font that does, which is apparently Symbol (or just display a little pink box).

There’s something not quite right about that Freebats font. I just downloaded and installed it, and the flat symbol doesn’t have any Unicode value whatsoever mapped to it.

Edit: Trying it in TextEdit, Option-B does actually give the flat symbol (♭), so I guess this is something hard-coded in the font. I guess perhaps InDesign just ignores these hard-coded ‘hacks’ and goes by Unicode value alone. Oddly, regular typing (abcde…) works fine in InDesign but does absolutely nothing in TextEdit, or indeed in Font Book. I don’t know how the creator of Freebats did his mapping, but not altogether efficiently, it would seem.

[birdman]

Wow, thanks for the research! Sounds like maybe that's why Freebats is free. I just checked OS X's Character Palette and found a flat in Apple Symbols (and several other fonts), but since there's no keyboard combination I'd still be stuck with inserting one, then copying and pasting. Oh well, I suppose it's not that much more trouble than an integral find-and-replace, for as much as I need to use it. I was just more taken aback because I'd never seen that behavior before.

-birdman

[Oisín]

The only difference between the flat in Freebats and the one you find in the character palette is that the one in Freebats seems to be superscript, while the standard flat symbol is not. I don’t know which would be more desirable for your needs.

If you need this particular symbol very regularly, you can always download an application like Ukelele and edit the US keyboard layout file to add it, simply replacing the ∫ symbol with the ♭ symbol as the default mapping for Option-B, for example.

This would obviously work on the computer where you then install the new, edited keyboard layout file, but if you do your design mostly on one computer, it can definitely be worth it.

[birdman]

Fortunately, the Glyphs palette remembers recently-used symbols, so the Freebats flat is there every time I need it; I just highlight the text I want to replace, double-click the symbol in the Glyphs palette to place it, then copy and paste it wherever I need it. Not a huge pain, and not really much different than what I had been doing previously. (My main beef was the curiosity in the font not working the way I expected.)

However, I just discovered that InDesign's find-and-replace has an option to replace with the formatted clipboard contents. This makes the process much quicker, because I can highlight a section of text, tell it to replace "-flat" with the glyph on the clipboard, and off we go.

-birdman