Alternates are part of a Pro typeface set. If you can afford some of the sets that Adobe Systems offers, quite often Alternates, OldStyle figures (marked OS or OsF), dingbats that are compatible with the font, a fractions companion font, true small caps, and so on. What I’m interested in covering for two seconds here are the Alternates typeface.

A million years ago, Letraset gave away a Font of The Month online. Sadly, they stopped doing that, but religiously I collected about 18 months’ worth of them, and one two months, they gave away their rendition of University Roman and then University Roman Alternates, characters with swashes in this case.

When you take the time and bother to hand-kern a headline (which a professional should do), a bonus can be to use your artistic taste and add an alternate character or two when you own the Alternates font. And it doesn’t have to be a tedious pain in the neck—all you have to do in Xara is declare one character in a string the Alternate character and you’re 90% of the way done. You don’t have to choose the second font again. Here’s what you do:

With the Text tool, highlight an Alternate character, and then press Ctrl+C to put it on the Clipboard. Then highlight a regular font character you want to change to Alternate, and press Ctrl+Shift+A to Paste Attributes, not the contents of the Clipboard.

It sounds very simple, but didn’t occur to me until one day when I was changing characters to different fonts that I imagined there had to be a quicker way.

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My Best,

—Gary