Typophile - OT Alternative Characters - Comments

> Out of curiosity does not

Miguel Sousa — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:04:06 -0800

> Out of curiosity does not having the dot before alt compromise anything?

Where and why glyph names are used

Miguel, thanks I’ll try

Mike Jarboe — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:34:19 -0800

Miguel, thanks I’ll try that and correct the alt adding the dot before.

Out of curiosity does not having the dot before alt compromise anything?

Appreciate your response!

Mike

Okay cool thats working now

Mike Jarboe — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:31:26 -0800

Okay cool thats working now I thought my output error had to do with the above lookup code but it was within a font that I had removed all of the kerning data but left the kern feature in… as soon as I deleted the kern feature and compiled all was fine… happens to be a font that i’m redoing the kerning on…

Mike, ’aalt’ is

Miguel Sousa — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:42:47 -0800

Mike, ’aalt’ is (indirectly) accessed via the Glyph Palette.
But anyway, I think this is what you want:
feature aalt { feature salt; feature ss01; feature titl; } aalt;


feature salt {

lookup OALT {

sub O by Oalt;

sub Oacute by Oacutealt;

sub Ograve by Ogravealt;

sub Ocircumflex by Ocircumflexalt;

sub Odieresis by Odieresisalt;

sub Otilde by Otildealt;

sub Oslash by Oslashalt;

sub o by oalt;

sub oacute by oacutealt;

sub ograve by ogravealt;

sub ocircumflex by ocircumflexalt;

sub odieresis by odieresisalt;

sub otilde by otildealt;

sub oslash by oslashalt;

}OALT;

} salt;
feature ss01 {

lookup OALT;

} ss01;

feature titl { lookup OALT; } titl;

And while you’re at it, the correct glyph names for your alternates is O.alt , Oacute.alt , etc. (notice the dot before ’alt’)

OT Alternative Characters

Mike Jarboe — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:27:08 -0800

Having a bit of trouble with alt characters… everything works fine in the Fontlab OpenType features window using

feature aalt {
sub O by Oalt;
sub Oacute by Oacutealt;
sub Ograve by Ogravealt;
sub Ocircumflex by Ocircumflexalt;
sub Odieresis by Odieresisalt;
sub Otilde by Otildealt;
sub Oslash by Oslashalt;
sub o by oalt;
sub oacute by oacutealt;
sub ograve by ogravealt;
sub ocircumflex by ocircumflexalt;
sub odieresis by odieresisalt;
sub otilde by otildealt;
sub oslash by oslashalt;
} aalt;

But I noticed there’s no way to access ’aalt’ in Illustrator CS3… so I wanted to add salt, ss01 and maybe titl as well in the OT features for multi-application access.

I found this thread containing a suggestion:

Whenever you define any features in your font that produce 1:1 substitutions by some alternates (salt, ss01-ss20, swsh, hist, smcp, c2sc etc.), you should link these features to aalt in the following way:

feature aalt { 
feature salt; 
feature ss01; 
feature ss02; 
feature hist;
 feature smcp; 
feature c2sc;
 } aalt;

But not sure how to implement and ’link’ these… does it go above or below the ’aalt’ feature code?

And does aalt on it’s own just not show up in some applications such as Illustrator?

Thanks