How to Automatically Substitute Glyph in Illustrator?

Software
#1

Hi all,

I’m using a beautiful font that I love, but the only downside is sloping sides of the capital M. However, there’s an alternate glyph with straight up and down sides. How can I tell Illustrator or the font to automatically use the alternate M instead of the default? It’s way too tedious and time-consuming to highlight and click it every single time. I hope there’s a way.

Thanks in advance!

#2

Odd, I would have figured find and replace would do it, but Illustrator’s find and replace is horrible compared to InDesign.

#3

You can always use a free or open source font editor, like FontForge, to open the font and swap the glyph outlines before saving it back to an .otf or .ttf. Keep in mind that the font’s licensing agreement may not permit this.

#4

Personally, I find just about everything about setting type in Illustrator horrible compared to InDesign. Setting several bits of display type is one thing, but anything in which it would be:

. . . is much better done in InDesign.

In a few cases where I wanted the final product to be an Illustrator file, but needed some fully-justified “body” type, I set the paragraphs in InDesign, exported to PDF and Placed the PDF in Illustrator. I got much better control of justification, etc., than is possible in Illustrator, and the whole thing worked just fine.

#5

Typefaces include many characters in addition to the ones you see on your keyboard. Depending on the font, these characters can include ligatures, fractions, swashes, ornaments, ordinals, titling and stylistic alternates, superior and inferior characters, old‑style figures, and lining figures. A glyph is a specific form of a character. For example, in certain fonts, the capital letter A is available in several forms, such as swash and small cap.There are three ways to insert alternate glyphs:The Selection in-context menu lets you view and insert glyphs available for a selected character.The Glyphs panel lets you view and insert glyphs from any typeface.The OpenType panel lets you set up rules for using glyphs. For example, you can specify that you want to use ligatures, titling characters, and fractions in a given text block. Using the OpenType panel is easier than inserting glyphs one at a time and ensures a more consistent result. However, the panel works only with OpenType fonts

#6