Random character choice

[bradipo]

Hi there,

as FontLab seems to be the only serious utility for font creation on a Mac, I'd like you to tell me if it's able to realize the following project.

I'd like to create an Open Type font with special capabilities based on an enhanced use of ligatures. My idea is that I'd like to sample every character of my font not once, but 4 to 6 times, every one with little variations. These context-sensitive characters should appear or following rules, as defined by ligatures (only that I'd rather them extended also to non-classical character combinations, for instance choosing a specific variation of the "g" in "gt" that'd be a different one as the "g" in "gi"), or randomly chosen between a specific set of variations (like choosing a g between variations 3 to 5 if followed by an e).

As far as I'm aware, there's no font "programmed" with such a set of rules, and surely not without reason. I'm not even sure if it'd be possible to create a set of ligatures with hundreds of combinations of two, maybe even three characters that any word processing application would handle. Maybe somebody here could enlighten me.

Thanks !

[mekkablue]

There are ligatures (liga and dlig features) and contextual alternatives (calt). As far as I understand you, you can use both. And don't mix characters and glyphs. OT features only replace glyphs, they leave your characters untouched.

I believe completely random replacements are not yet supported in any end-user software, but you can already implement something like this in your OT features:

substitute ampersand from [ampersand.1 ampersand.2 ampersand.3];

For more details (I also took the above example from there), take a look at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_feature_file_syntax.html

[Ted Harrison (FontLab)]

It's not built in, but it is possible. Letterror demonstrated a font at the Minneapolis Typecon a few years back in which they had several alternatives for each glyph and the one to be used in a specific instance was selected at random. I suspect this involved some serious programming or scripting.

[bradipo]

Hi there,

thanks for your answers. What Letterror did seems near to my own project, as randomly chosen glyphs are a part of it. As I'm quite new to creating fonts with a computer, and totally unaware of programming issues, could you please tell me where exactly the programming or scripting that ensures my font to behave like I want would have to be done ? Fonts are used by computer programs like word processors. As far as I'm aware, you can't script a word processor to this kind of behavior, a font is used as a black box by it. So I imagine the scripting must be done while creating the font.

I tried to read parts of the syntax of that opentype manual, but it's not of immediate access ;-) Does FontLab contain the instruments to do this ? Is there any possibility to contact Letterror and ask him how he did it ? Normally a few years are a long time for programs. Probably his instruments to achieve his goal were quite different from what FontLab may offer today, so his way may be not at all what you'd have to do with an actual version of FontLab ?

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