How To Type Special Alternative Character Glyphs On Your Mac

Some advanced fonts have alternative versions of characters called glyphs that are used automatically with specific letter combinations. You can also access these special glyphs individually if you know where to look in Pages, TextEdit and Microsoft Word.

Check out How To Type Special Alternative Character Glyphs On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using alternative character glyphs on your Mac. 
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So on some fonts some of the characters will be different depending upon where you use the character. Let me show you what I mean. Technically a glyph is just a character in a font. So all of these are glyphs. But when people talk about glyphs they usually mean alternative characters. So in most fonts, like this one, a capital letter T is always going to look like this. It's always going to be the same. There are no alternatives.But in some fonts there are. One font that you probably have on your Mac is called Zapfino. 
So let's change this to Zapfino and you could see it looks like something that is handwritten or calligraphy. Typically fonts that have alternative glyphs look like this. Now notice how the letter T looks different in the first word here than all the other words. The font has an alternative letter T. A few in fact. The font has special instructions in it that say to use a different character for the capital T if it's followed by a lower case h. So you could see here how it looks different in the word the as opposed to all of these other words.
Now if we take a look in Font Book and we go to All Fonts and then find Zapfino and then switch to the grid view here then we can look through the different letters in the font. Now we can see here the standard letter T. But instead of U being after it we can see there are a few alternatives to the letter T. There's this one. There's this one and there's this one before we get to the letter u. These are the alternative glyphs and they're included as separate characters in the font. Now to actually type these you don't have to do anything. For instance if I were to type the capital letter T you could see it uses the default one. If I were to type r after it sticks with that capital T. But if instead I were to type h after it, it instantly switches the T out.
But what if I wanted to do that manually. Like I just wanted to have the letter T as kind of a flourish in a box or something like that. I could select the letter T and there's a way to force it to use a different glyph. You're not going to find that here in the sidebar in Pages. Instead you're going to have to go to Format, Font, Show Font and this brings up the system font panel. Here you're going to find a few extras that you can't find in Pages. One of those is I can select the Tools here and go to Typography. Here I've got some special settings that are different for each font. Glyph Variants is one of those. If I select that it's going to show me any characters that are selected that have variants in them. I can click here and you can see all the various letter T's. 
Now I can select one here. Unfortunately Pages isn't going to use it. So if I select this one then Pages is just not going to use it. Kind of its automatic process overrides your selection. However if instead of glyph variants I go to Stylistic Variant then I could see No Change and then First, Second, Third, Fourth, etc. I can select one here and it will actually change the letter T to use the first variant, the second variant, third, and fourth. So you can see the fourth there is the default. You don't really know what these look like until you try them.
Now if you select a whole bunch of letters and then go to Format, Font, Show Fonts and then to Typography you can see glyph variants for any characters in the selection. But you likewise can't use them there. You can, however, select Stylistic Variants like this and you could see how it changes them to use the First variant for each character. It's more likely you want to do it on an individual character basis. 
Now this works better in TextEdit. So in TextEdit I can go in here and select Zapfino as the font. Select the letter T there. Go to Format, Font, Show Fonts, select Typography and in here the variants will let me actually select a different character and it will work. 
So what other fonts have this? Well, none of the default Mac fonts that I could find except there are some hidden fonts on your Mac. Fonts that are supposed to be only used by certain apps. You won't find them in font lists like this here in TextEdit or in Pages. But if you do go to Format, Font, Show Fonts and then you select All Fonts here you'll find more fonts. Fonts that are hidden and one of those fonts is called Apple Chancery. You can switch to that. When you do that you can select a letter like the letter T and go to Typography and then you could see that there are glyph variants here in this particular font. So I can select a different T, for instance. 
So most fonts won't have this. But a few, especially really high end fonts like the type that you might work with if you deal with typography a lot have alternative glyphs. Notice here with Apple Chancery when you go to the fonts panel here and then you look at typography the list here looks very different than what you find with Zapfino. As a matter of fact Stylistic variations aren't even here. So how do you change this here if glyphs variants doesn't work in Pages which one do you use. Well, you have to experiment. You have to go to each one of these and try them. In this case with Apple Chancery I found that Design Complexity has variants here and I could switch between those to change the letter T. So that's how you do it with Apple Chancery.
This is all very picky. For instance if I were to change the glyph variants to something and then select the letter again then this doesn't work and I have to kind of exit the entire thing, go back out, you know, replace the letter with the standard glyph like that, and then start over again in order to get the design complexity to work. So it's a bit of struggle sometimes to work with this stuff.
Now how about Microsoft Word. How do you get this in Word because you can't bring up the system font panel in word. Here let me go and change to Zapfino for this. Notice right away Word doesn't do very well. The letter capital T isn't changed to match the lower case h after it. It's the same as in the other words. I can still get to the glyphs by selecting the capital T. Now what you want to do is go to Format, Font. Wait for that to come up and then switch to Advanced. Then look for Stylistic Sets. Now you would think you would select a Stylistic Set there and it would change the Preview. But it doesn't. So you switch to 1 and you hit OK and then notice it has actually changed the letter. So you can get to these but it's a little more difficult. Plus I was never actually able to get it to put the capital T in the same way that Pages does it right here to use that nice glyph properly.
So yeah it can be really frustrating to work with these glyphs. But if you really want just the right version of a letter for a specific situation it's nice to know how to get to it.

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Type Special Alternative Character Glyphs On Your Mac”

Lois Kelly

12 months ago

Thank you. This particular article addressed perfectly a question I have been laboring over for a couple years.

Tal

10 months ago

This did not help me as the font I want to access the glyphs says that it does not offer any typographic features. However I can see that there are many different letter styles in the font and many characters. The only letters I can access at this point are the first list ? there must be a way !!!!!

Gary Rosenzweig

Tal: Perhaps the font just has those as completely separate characters?

How To Type Special Alternative Character Glyphs On Your Mac

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Type Special Alternative Character Glyphs On Your Mac”

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