Ordinal Problem - also posted in InDesign Scripting

Question

I am running InDesign CS3 on XP.  I know there are other posts about ordinal problems, but none seem to lead me to a solution.
My many fonts work with ordinal in MS Word when typing numbers like 22nd, 36th, etc.  However, the same fonts in InDesign do NOT display ordinal type.  Only a select few fonts work with ordinal in InDesign.  When I scroll to the "Open Type" submenu for most fonts, ordinal is in brackets [ordinal].  I still select it, but nothing comes of it. Even with basic fonts like Tiimes New Roman.
Any ideas of how to fix this?  Just seems odd when the fonts work in MS Office but not Adobe.
Thanks,
Jarred

Answer 1

It can't be done (safely -- see below) with a single GREP; 1st, 2nd, 3rd need special handling.
In general, you can look for
(?<=\d)th\b
and replace with no text, just Superscript in the Change To formatting. This looks for any text "th" with a number on its left (the parenthesized expression), and a clear word break on its right (the backslash b).
"1st" needs
(?<=1)st\b
"2nd" and "3rd" need
(?<=2)nd\b (?<=3)rd\b
If your text allows it, you can try to do all at once:
(?<=\d)(st|nd|rd|th)\b
-- this way you also automatically pick up wrong ordinals, such as "1nd".