6/10/2023 0 Comments Fontforge link glyph to another![]() The following screenshots show my recommended Fontforge preferences: Screenshot 01 Screenshot 02 Screenshot 03 Screenshot 04 Screenshot 05 Screenshot 06 As the fonts we work on are fairly large in size and therefor use a lot of memory when opened in Fontforge, I recommend to have at least 1GB of RAM. Get a recent copy of it (from or later) and install it on your development machine. The fonts are produced using Fontforge a superb open source font editor.It doesn't really matter which distribution you use (I personally use Debian Etch and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron), as long as it is fairly recent. I really recommend to do the development on a native Linux system, because all necessary tools come already with most distributions.If I wanted to avoid this, I would have to make the unswashed version the default and add another lookup that unconditionally replaces it with the swashed version (which can then be deswashed conditionally).This is a short tutorial about how to contribute to the fonts. If an application does not support OpenType, the swashed variant is shown by default. Note that this approach has one disadvantage: If I wanted to deswash more letters, I could add additional substitutions here. It simply replaces the character s with the character s.noswash. Note that it is a single substitution and not associated with any feature, as it only exists to be called by another lookup:įinally, the actual lookup is shown below. This instructs the font that if a character of class s (which only contains the letter s, but may contain all letters to be deswashed in a different scenario) is followed by a character of the class letter (which contains all letters, see below), the substitution s to s.noswash shall be applied to it.įinally, the metadata of the second lookup is shown below. It tells OpenType to what type of feature it is associated ( calt – Contextual Alternatives) as well as the type (Contextual Chaining Substitution): The first lookup is the contextual chaining feature that detects when to do something (which then happens by applying the second feature). To achieve this, I use the swashed form as a default and use contextual substitutions (as in the linked tutorial) to replace it with the unswashed form whenever a letter follows. The former shall be used at the end of words, the latter everywhere else. In this case, I have two forms of the letter s, one with a swash ( s) and one without ( s.noswash). I’ll just show you the easiest way to do this with screenshots from the interface. If you use a feature that is activated by default (like calt), it should work in most applications where you would reasonably use a cursive font (i.e., software for design, typesetting, and similar, as well as browsers). The main difference between the otf and ttf file extensions (as usually used) is not the support of OpenType but things like the degree of Bézier curves, hinting information, and so on. What do I need to do next to indicate they must be used at the end of a word, instead of the normal glyphs? How do you do that with FontForge? I have already created my glyph variants as unmapped glyphs (with Unicode value −1) and named them something like s.fina, p.fina, etc. ) will actually use my glyph variants appropriately, and not just advanced desktop publishing software like InDesign? Can I assume most common applications (web browsers on most platforms, most graphic-design apps, basic word processors. Or maybe it is, but for Arabic and not Latin, it is not quite clear. ![]() It seems that this may not be supported by all applications, actually. It seems the features I need requires to generate an OpenType font, not TrueType. I have found a few tutorials that seem to provides some hints ( example), but it doesn’t seem that straightforward, and mainly indicates how to do substitution depending on the previous/next chars, but not depending on the character position within the word. ![]() I am very new to this, and I must say I’m stunned by the apparent complexity of doing what I want. ) at the end of a word, so that there is no spurious joining line for the next character in this situation. I am working on a handwritten cursive font (latin character set) using FontForge, and wish to have glyph variants for a few characters ( s, p.
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