Using small caps instead of lower case when editing text

[Ove Ask]

I've made a text document in InDesign, containing upper case, lower case and small caps using Minion Pro, and exported as a PDF (embedding the font completely).

When opening the PDF and using the edit text tool i PitStop Pro 11 update 2 to edit the text, the lower case letters that I type are substituted for the corresponding small caps used in the document. The upper case letters are not substituted however. See image below.

lc_to_small_caps.jpg (31.4 KiB) Viewed 4621 times

Here's a link to the pdf for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rb1bz7inev357 ... s.pdf?dl=0

Any solutions on how to avoid this substitution in PitStop? (One possible solution is to select the text and change to an identical system font (if there is one), but I wish to use the embedded font.)

Thanks.

[bens]

Hi,

Text in PDF is a very complex matter. I won't bore you with the details, but here's a high level overview of what's going on:
When you press for example the letter 'e' on your keyboard, PitStop checks the font to see which glyph should be shown on the page. Here, it goes through the Unicode mapping in the font. Because you pressed the key 'e', PitStop tries to find the glyph in the font representing Unicode "Latin Small Letter E". But this font says there are 2 glyphs for "Latin Small Letter E"! PitStop doesn't know which one to take, so it uses the first one, which happens to be the small capital E.

In essence, the font is bad. Moreover, as far as I can see it only contains 14 small caps: the ones used in "small caps: abcdefghijkl", so there isn't even a way to type for example "XYZ" in small caps with that embedded font.

If you use Acrobat to edit the text it uses a different version of the font. If you want to avoid that, the only solution I see is to copy correct pieces of text to create a new line - which is of course very tedious.
I would advise using two different fonts: one for the normal letters and one for small caps.

[Ove Ask]

Thanks bens for your input!
Your explaination sounds very plausible – apparently small caps are not included in Unicode as separate codes. If PitStop finds two glyphs for one common letter (e.g. "Latin Small Letter E") as you suggested, it would have been very neat if one could simply tell PitStop which glyph to use.

If I select the small caps 'D' in "Second" using the Edit text tool, choose "Select font" in the Inspector, press the tab "Document" and then select the Minio Pro typeface embedded in the document, a lower case 'd' is actually shown. Apparently this shows that there is still a connection to this glyph.

Any other members having any suggestions on how to avoid this small caps substitution problem? Is this an issue for those of you using newer versions of PitStop as well?