Confused by terms like stylistic and contextual alternates? Not sure how to find those hidden ornaments? Here’s a basic guide to opentype features that will get you caught up. This tutorial focuses on Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. Right now photoshop doesn’t have a glyph palette so some of these features can’t be accessed. Hopefully in the future that will change.

All Alternates
This feature will give you access to all the alternates available for a glyph. The most common way this is done is within the glyph palette in the adobe applications, InDesign and Illustrator. In the glyph palette simply find a glyph that contains an arrow in the lower right corner and click it and select the alternate.

Here we see the K swash alternate for the typeface Taroca in the Adobe Illustrator glyph palette.

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