Contextual Alternates

#1

Is there any indication if this feature is possible or when it will be implemented? I love this plugin but making handwritten fonts are kind of lacking without it

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#2

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I am a user like you. Currently you can name glyphs with ligatures (.liga) and alternatives (.alt). See https://help.fontself.com/en/articles/1237307-ligatures
While ligatures are used automatically in a word processor, alternatives have to be called manually. OpenType Font also knows tags like .init or .final for an automatic alternative of a first or last letter of a word. This is unfortunately not yet available in Fontself Maker. But I hope that it will be available soon. Because it is very handy for script and handwriting fonts.

Have a good time, J.

#3

Just want to add my voice that I too would love contextual alternates! Would be great for a monogram font, where I’ll have different alternate sets for first, middle, and last letter.

#4

Hello and welcome to the forum,
that’s a good idea. the .otf can do so much more like swash and so on. Do you know the featuere list of mircosoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/featurelist ?

greetings, jens

#5

Hey, we are not going to be able to implement contextual alternates or other OpenType features soon, but we are preparing something that will help us provide a more robust feature set on the long term. Keep the faith and stay tuned :wink:

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#6

Since fontself is really easy and practical, I use fontself to insert glyphs, alternates, ligatures, doing basic settings and arrangements… if I could do it on fontself, i’d do it… if not, then I have to use other apps…

This is the example of fonts that I (think) made solely on fontself : Crackers, Sketchen & Streetwall

#7

I’m not quite clear on this.

This article looks like contextual alternatives are supported …

Are there different types of contextual alts?

TIA

#8

Hello Yarpy, welcome to this forum.

As you can read in the help.fontself.com you mentioned:
" The OpenType format defines an alternate as a substitution of a glyph by another one, picked from a defined set of possible glyphs. Many types of substitution are defined to cover all languages needs ( contextual , stylistic , access all , etc.). To keep things simple, Fontself Maker currently defines only one type of alternates, called aalt for access all alternates . This type makes all alternates of a selected character always accessible."

So, fontself knows and creates only one type of alternates, which can be used in any cases.

best regards,
jens

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