Publisher 2010’s font typography features jazz up your publications

new additions to Publisher 2010 is the advanced OpenType typography capability. It enables you to add ligatures, stylistic and contextual alternates, swashes, and numbering styles.  If you're unfamiliar with typographic terms, take a look at this Beginners Guide to OpenType before we examine some of these features.

Stylistic Sets

First, let's look at what choosing different style sets can do, starting with the default stylistic set for Gabriola:

And below is the seventh and most flamboyant stylistic set for Gabriola.

You can get pretty flamboyant with these styles. You can see the effect that different selections will have on your text by highlighting the text and then, on the Text Box Tools Format tab, selecting the Stylistic Sets dropdown in the Typography group

.

As shown below, the Stylistic Sets dropdown (will show you all the style options for the selected text.

Numbering Styles

The numbering styles are more subtle. Below you can see the five different numbering styles available in the Calibri font. The biggest impact is in the Old-styles, where the numbers float up and down instead of all staying to a baseline.

Advanced feature support

Unfortunately, most fonts do not yet support OpenType advanced typography, and some only support some of the advanced options. At this point the fonts that are installed with Publisher that support some or all of the advanced typographic features are:

• Calibri
• Cambria
• Cambria Math
• Candara
• Consolas
• Constantia
• Corbel
• Gabriola - note that this is a particularly rich font for advanced typographic features
• Palatino Linotype
• Sylfaen

You can also find fonts and font packs online that support these features. You can find a list of font providers at Microsoft Typography - Font foundries.

For more information on Publisher 2010's advanced typography features, see  Use typographic styles to increase the impact of your publication.

 -- Bob deLaubenfels