Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion

[Barbara B]

Hi Bill.
If we can find out how to create the non-breaking space -- Xara Designer is one of the products that does recognize it.

I typed the following in Xara Designer Pro:

Xara Designer Pro Xara Designer Pro

The first Xara Designer Pro has Alt+255 (number pad numbers) between the three words that make up the name. The second one does not. If you resize the text box the first Xara Designer Pro acts like it is one word and the second will wrap between the words.

This post editor doesn't recognize non-breaking space when entered from the keyboard as Alt+255, so you can't see it working here, but when directly entered in Xara Designer non-breaking spaces do work!

[Soquili]

Barbara as long as an application recognized the non-breaking space we can include it within the font. We can copy the space and paste it into the correct cell for the hard space.

In the Ariel font Alt+0160 is the Non-Breaking Space.

[Barbara B]

Super!

Folks who do HTML coding should be useing the HTML entity   to produce the space, but anyone doing DTP in a program that recognizes it really benefits from having it in the font.

I commonly use non-breaking spaces to keep proper names, or dates together so that they are always on the same line and are read as a unit.

[adamtwar]

1. OpenType fonts come in two flavors: with TrueType outlines (.ttf extension, they are backwards compatible to TrueType fonts) and with PostScript outlines (.otf extension). Apart from the sort of outlines used to construct glyphs, these flavors are interchangeable and have the same abilities.

2. Any OpenType font can (but does not have to) include OpenType Layout features. OpenType Layout features are a mechanism to style your text with different glyphs than the default ones provided by the font. For each character (e.g. a letter), alternate glyphs can be included in the font. Those alternate glyphs can represent one character (e.g. a small-cap A or a swash A) or more characters (e.g. an fi or st ligature).

3. For many non-European scripts (such as Arabic or Indic), OpenType Layout features are applied automatically during typesetting, without the user's intervention. In that case, the alternate glyphs are necessary for correct orthographic rendering of that script.

4. For European scripts, some applications allow the user to selectively enable and disable features. Rather than inserting the alternate glyphs directly, the user would typically choose an appropriate feature, i.e. a styling function. There is a registered set of OpenType Layout features and each has a particular purpose, for example one is for replacing uppercase letters with small-cap letters, another for replacing lining (uppercase) figures with oldstyle (lowercase) figures, another for common ligatures, another for rare ligatures, yet another for swashes, others for so-called stylistic sets (which can be arbitrary decorative or special-purpose variants) and so on. Enabling a feature replaces the default glyphs with some alternate glyphs (depending on which feature is enabled), or repositions the glyphs (e.g. shifts them up or increases spacing).

5. OpenType Layout is not a proprietary technology. It is part of the international standard ISO/IEC 14496-22.

6. Many applications enable user-controlled OpenType Layout features, for example on Windows Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Publisher 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6, Serif Page Plus X6, QuarkXPress 9, Microsoft Expression Blend, Adobe Flash, and quite a few others. On Mac OS X, all applications that use the system Fonts palette can use OpenType Layout features.

7. It's not completely trivial for software developers to add support for user-controlled OpenType Layout features, mostly because the developers need to add a user interface for the features, and they need to make changes to their application's text storage system so that the application "knows" which features have been enabled on which text. But "under the hood", adding support for them is not complicated. Windows includes a system library called Uniscribe which provides a programming API that allows developers to apply user-controlled OpenType Layout features to the text.

8. With the release of Corel DRAW Graphics Suite X6, the two most popular drawing applications for Windows (Adobe Illustrator and Corel DRAW) have support for user-controlled OpenType Layout features. Xara is clearly lagging behind. I'd encourage the Xara developers to consider adding comprehensive OpenType Layout support in the next generation of their software.

9. I'm an OpenType and font development expert and am potentially available for consulting services in that area.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
http://www.twardoch.com/

[Soquili]

Thanks Adam and welcome to TalkGraphics.

[angelize]

Yes, thanks Adam for the explanations, And Welcome to Talkgraphics!

[Barbara B]

Hello Adam,

Welcome to TalkGraphics. We are very honored to have you stop by and share your knowledge with us.

Adam is currently the Product and Marketing Manager for FontLab LTD, and on staff as a "glyph wrangler' and typographic researcher, and resident OpenType and Unicode expert at Bitstream's MyFont.com. He previously has been a typographic and technical consultant for Microsoft, Linotype GmbH, a subsidiary of Montotype Imaging and Tiro Typeworks.

With your vast experience in the world of typography, fonts and foundries do you have any advice or criticism you can give us on the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font we (members of the Font and Typography Forum here on TG) are about to release as a free font? Any technical or marketing advice would be greatly appreciated.

[wizard509]

Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG[/I] font we (members of the Font and Typography Forum here on TG) are about to release as a free font? Any technical or marketing advice would be greatly appreciated.

Welcome to TG Adam. It's good to have someone with your knowledge here, sounds like you will be a definite asset to the forum. I'll second what Barbara said.

[adamtwar]

Barbara,

I've taken a look at the most recent version of the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font. I think it’s a great effort, and the choice of assigning the glyphs to the plain ASCII codes is a reasonable one. The TTF format has a special way of encoding symbol fonts but I think it’s not a very reliable mechanism and is confusing to users. Also, the Symbol font encoding is not supported by OTF, so it’s very difficult to release a font with compatible encoding in both OTF and TTF.

I also definitely support the idea of releasing the font under the SIL Open Font License. I’ll post a few comments in the other thread.