Null characters possible?

#1

Hello. I’ve created a font for certain characters using FontSelf.

In InDesign, I am using my custom font as a character style using GREP to find certain strings to render in the new font. The symbol for such a string is ^. However, when Indesign then renders that string, the ‘^’ renders as a missing glyph. I can’t find a way to disable that.

The obvious solution would be to assign ‘^’ to a null character in my custom font. That is, that symbol would be defined as nothing – not a space, nothing. However, I can’t find a way to do that within FontSelf. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is there a way to do this?

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#2

Hello Antiochus
the sign ^ “caret” ist a diacritic – also diacritical mark , diacritical point , diacritical sign , or accent – is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph.
There for it needs to enter a second sign like “a” for â or " " “space” for it self ^.

I tried a small font with special chars and used GREP in InDesign to make the caret red.
The only way to do not enter a space for the caret is, give the caret another name like alt+^ = „

Test%20in%20AI
Test in AI.jpg1654×1007 284 KB

See my files in here:
Archiv.zip (2.1 MB)

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#3

Thanks for the reply. The caret is just a placeholder, a way for me to designate the following character as ‘special’. It could be a question mark, or an ampersand.

In other words, I want “C” to appear as C, “^C” (or &C or ?C) to appear as the special glyph assigned to C.

Does that help?

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#4

if you call your glyph “C.alt” then it can be a alternative version of the letter “C” like “^C”.
See https://help.fontself.com/en/articles/1237736-alternates

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#5

You could also look at ligatures to replace any string like ^C by a specific glyph: https://help.fontself.com/en/articles/1237307-ligatures

It really depends on what you try to achieve and what’s your input text.

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