OpenType Fonts in Word

[RoystonB]

I have seen the use of OpenType fonts in Photoshop. These fonts have
additions to the style of which they are formed. Within Photoshop, can be
added Glyphs and other additions that make the character flourish.

My question is 'Will word support these additions to OpenType fonts' or have
they already.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Current versions of Word do not support all the features of OpenType. It
remains to be seen whether Office 12 will.

 

[feline1]

Does anyone know what (if any?) OpenType features Word 2003 (SP2) supports?

I mean, it lets me use OpenType fonts, but is it doing *anything* with the
their advanced typography support? Does it do any glyph substitutions?
Or does it just treat them as if they were plain old TrueTypes?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

My understanding is that current versions of Word are not able to use the
advanced features of OpenType, so in fact they are treated the same as
TrueType. Sorry.

 

[feline1]

Suzanne, are you just drawing that conclusion from observation,
or is it actually documented anywhere?

(I've been searching Word's own help, and microsoft.com,
but so far I haven't discovered any info on the subject -
there are some more exotic looking features on dialogues
for international text, but they're not expilictly labelled as
being to do with OpenType -
As far as ordinary Latin text goes, in the Format > Font dialogs
for example, there's mainly just all this rubbish about "marching ants"
and the like - I somehow doubt that's OpenType functionality :0)

It's funny, cos Microsoft have been one of the big developers of OpenType,
and www.microsoft.com/typography is full of papers and developer
resources dealing with it - you'd think they'd implement it in their
own main application for dealing with text!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I believe I have read this somewhere (possibly in the word.printingfonts
NG), but I can't find anything about it at
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx. Since you will note,
however, that there is no mention of OpenType there at all, I suspect that
the information is correct.

 

[feline1]

I was playing with Adobe InDesign CS yesterday,
now it certainly *does* support OpenType advanced typography:

If you've got some text on the page, and it's in a font which supports any
of the following features, you can do a few right-clicks and activate them on
the selected text:

- Discretionary Ligatures
- Fraction
- Ordinal
- Swash
- Titling Alternatives
- Contextual Alternatives
- All Small Caps
- Superscript/Superior & Subscript/Inferior
- Numerator & Denominator
- Tabular Lining
- Proportional Oldstyle
- Proportional Lining
- Tabular Oldstyle
- Default Figure Style

The only ones from this list that I think Word 2003 offers for Latin text
are small caps, and superscript and subscripts:
but since it offers those for *all* fonts it has, I doubt it's doing them
via OpenType, but simply just shrinking the TrueType glyphs and repositioning
them itself.

Oh well - when's the next edition of Word due then?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Your surmise concerning small caps and superscripts/subscripts is correct.
Typophiles are very disparaging about small caps produced this way because
they are a different weight from the rest of the text. The next version of
Office (currently just called Office 12, its version number) will probably
ship sometime next fall. AFAIK, it does not offer OpenType support, but I
could be pleasantly surprised.