Accessing glyphs in Avant Garde Pro

"Above 400"? You mean like the Cyrillic unicode characters starting at 400? If so, they work fine for me with whatever fonts I have. I do not have Avant Garde Pro, however.

If you type a glyph using another font and try applying Avant Garde Pro to it, what happens?

Are you sure the glyphs you are after exist in Avant Garde Pro?

can't seem to get any of the glyphs above 400 to work

You need to explain what it is you are talking about in more detail. Are you trying to input glyph variants from Character Palette in View = Glyph from a Windows OpenType font? OS X apps may not support them. But first select your font in the Font Panel and hit the Advanced button (gear wheel) at the bottom left, then the Typography item, and see whether there are glyph variants or other features possibly turned off that can be turned on.

Can you give an example of the kind of glyph you are trying to input?

I'm pretty sure that the features you are referring to are OpenType glyph variants (there should be a reference to that at the very bottom of Character Palette when you select one). I think only Adobe apps can make use of them. OS X support for OpenType is not complete -- Apple has its own technology for doing the same thing called AAT, which you can see at work in a font like Zapfino.

But did you check the Font Panel > Gear Wheel > Typography item for this font as I suggested? Did it have anything there?

I'm not sure you have understood what I am talking about. Here are some instructions:

Open TextEdit, go to Format > Font > Show Fonts.

The font panel will come up. In the Family column select Avant Garde Pro.

Click on the Gear Wheel at the bottom left. Click on Typography.

What do you see? Anything about Ligatures, Letter Case, etc?

I think Tom is right with OpenType. Some OpenType features are supported in MacOS X but not others, and I have never found a pattern for which ones work.

However, I am still not sure about "390". In the Character Palette, the numbering depends on where you are. Which language do you have selected in the upper left corner? Which view?

Typography only gives me access to common and rare ligatures.

While the Character Palette does show you the glyphs in a font, it's the Typography settings which determine whether some glyphs (particularly those with no Unicode number) can be used or not.

I gather from this that you have in fact then clicked on Gear and also Typography (as well as Character). And you found the only options available were common/rare ligatures. I think this probably means that the other OpenType features of this font, represented in the glyphs in rows 390 -930, are not available in OS X apps (and are probably only usable in Adobe apps).

If you have any Adobe apps, or want to download one of their free trials, you could test that.

With Minion Pro, my Typography panel has Rare Ligatures, Historical Forms and Ligatures, Small Capitals, Small Caps from Capitals, plus other variations for Number Spacing, Vertical Position, Number Case, and Case Sensitive Layout.

It may be that OS X 10.5 will offer expanded support for special OpenType features, but we will have to wait a month or two to see if that is the case.

I'm a little surprised that your font does not offer the same typography options that Minion Pro does. Is it very old? Or very new?

Tom Gewecke wrote:
I'm a little surprised that your font does not offer the same typography options that Minion Pro does.

It is not that surprising.

Each OpenType font chooses which features it implements. You can very well have one without "oldstyle figures" for example, and then they will not show up.

Besides, as noted before, MacOS X does not cover all the OpenType options. I tried to compare for Minion, and in Adobe InDesign, I found the following glyph variants which I did not find in TextEdit:

a. denominators - (small numbers)
b. numerators - (super scripted numbers - different from superscripts for some reason)
c. stylistic alternates (only Greek e.g. ϖ)
d. Tabular figures.
e. Terminal forms - (only ς which is an ordinary unicode character 03c2, as far as I can tell, but Adobe may know better)

Besides the GID, Glyph IDentifier, is different between InDesign and the Character Palette. Some people may understand why, but I am not one of them.

I found the following glyph variants which I did not find in TextEdit:

Interesting, thanks!

But the behaviour and problems are exactly the same in TextEdit, are they not?

It all depends on what you call "problem in". MacOS X has implemented a way of handling fonts called AAT. That is used by so called Cocoa applications, like Pages, TextEdit and many others.

Adobe, on the other hand, does not use it. They want their applications to work 100% the same way on both Windows and MacOS X, preferably better than other applications. So they ignore AAT and use their own way of handling fonts.

So, MacOS X is not a "problem" in itself. It does not prevent things from working. It simply does not support everything that is needed on its own.