Access All Alternates

Tag: aalt

Function: This feature makes all variations of a selected character accessible. This serves several purposes: An application may not support the feature by which the desired glyph would normally be accessed; the user may need a glyph outside the context supported by the normal substitution, or the user may not know what feature produces the desired glyph. Since many-to-one substitutions are not covered, ligatures would not appear in this table unless they were variant forms of another ligature. A user inputs the P in Poetica, and is presented with a choice of the four standard capital forms, the eight swash capital forms, the initial capital form and the small capital form.

Standard Ligatures

Tag: liga

Function: Replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph which is preferred for typographic purposes. This feature covers the ligatures which the designer/manufacturer judges should be used in normal conditions. The glyph for ffl replaces the sequence of glyphs f f l.

Discretionary Ligatures

Tag: dlig

Function: Replaces a sequence of glyphs with a single glyph which is preferred for typographic purposes. This feature covers those ligatures which may be used for special effect, at the user's preference. The glyph for ct replaces the sequence of glyphs c t, or U+322E (Kanji ligature for "Friday") replaces the sequence U+91D1 U+66DC U+65E5.

Slashed Zero

Tag: zero

Function: Some fonts contain both a default form of zero, and an alternative form which uses a diagonal slash through the counter. Especially in condensed designs, it can be difficult to distinguish between 0 and O (zero and capital O) in any situation where capitals and lining figures may be arbitrarily mixed. This feature allows the user to change from the default 0 to a slashed form. When setting labels, the user applies this feature to get the slashed 0.

Expert Forms

Tag: expt

Function: Like the JIS78 Forms described above, this feature replaces standard forms in Japanese fonts with corresponding forms preferred by typographers. Although most of the JIS78 substitutions are included, the expert substitution goes on to handle many more characters. The user would invoke this feature to replace kanji character U+5516 with U+555E.

Full Width

Tag: fwid

Function: Replaces glyphs set on other widths with glyphs set on full (usually em) widths. In a CJKV font, this may include "lower ASCII" Latin characters and various symbols. In a European font, this feature replaces proportionally-spaced glyphs with monospaced glyphs, which are generally set on widths of 0.6 em. The user may invoke this feature in a Japanese font to get full monospaced Latin glyphs instead of the corresponding proportionally-spaced versions.

Half Width

Tag: hwid

Function: Replaces glyphs on proportional widths, or fixed widths other than half an em, with glyphs on half-em (en) widths. Many CJKV fonts have glyphs which are set on multiple widths; this feature selects the half-em version. There are various contexts in which this is the preferred behavior, including compatibility with older desktop documents. The user may replace a proportional Latin glyph with the same character set on a half-em width.

JIS78 Forms

Tag: jp78

Function: This feature replaces default (JIS90) Japanese glyphs with the corresponding forms from the JIS C 6226-1978 (JIS78) specification. The user would invoke this feature to replace kanji character U+5516 with U+555E.

Proportional Widths

Tag: pwid

Function: Replaces glyphs set on uniform widths (typically full or half-em) with proportionally spaced glyphs. The proportional variants are often used for the Latin characters in CJKV fonts, but may also be used for Kana in Japanese fonts. The user may invoke this feature in a Japanese font to get a proportionally-spaced glyph instead of a corresponding half-width Roman glyph or a full-width Kana glyph.

Traditional Forms

Tag: trad

Function: Replaces 'simplified' Chinese hanzi or Japanese kanji forms with the corresponding 'traditional' forms. The user inputs U+53F0 and is offered a choice of U+6AAF, U+81FA, or U+98B1.

Vertical Writing

Tag: vert

Function: Replaces default forms with variants adjusted for vertical writing when in vertical writing mode. While most CJKV glyphs remain vertical when set in vertical writing mode, some take a different form (usually rotated and repositioned) for this purpose. Glyphs covered by this feature correspond to the set normally rotated in low-end DTP applications. In vertical writing mode, the opening parenthesis (U+FF08) is replaced by the rotated form (U+FE35).

Vertical Rotation

Tag: vrt2

Function: Replaces some fixed-width (half-, third- or quarter-width) or proportional-width glyphs (mostly Latin or katakana) with forms suitable for vertical writing (that is, rotated 90 degrees clockwise). Note that these are a superset of the glyphs covered in the vert table. ATM/NT 4.1 and the Windows 2000 OTF driver impose the following requirements for an OpenType font with CFF outlines to be used for vertical writing: the vrt2 feature must be present in the GSUB table, it must comprises a single lookup of LookupType 1 and LookupFlag 0, and the lookup must have a single subtable. The predecessor feature, vert, is ignored. A rotated glyph must be designed such that its top side bearing and vertical advance as recorded in the Vertical Metrics ('vmtx') table are identical to the left side bearing and horizontal advance, respectively, of the corresponding upright glyph as recorded in the Horizontal Metrics ('hmtx') table. (The horizontal advance of the rotated glyph may be set to any value, since the glyph is intended only for vertical writing use. The vendor may however set it to head.unitsPerEm, to prevent overlap during font proofing tests, for example.) Thus, proportional-width glyphs with rotated forms in the vrt2 feature will appear identically spaced in both vertical and horizontal writing. In order for kerning to produce identical results as well, developers must ensure that the Vertical Kerning (vkrn) feature record kern values between the rotated glyphs that are the same as kern values between their corresponding upright glyphs in the Kerning (kern) feature. Proportional- or half-width Latin and half-width katakana characters are rotated 90 degrees clockwise for vertical writing.

Glyph Composition/Decomposition

Tag: ccmp

Function: To minimize the number of glyph alternates, it is sometimes desired to decompose a character into two glyphs. Additionally, it may be preferable to compose two characters into a single glyph for better glyph processing. This feature permits such composition/decompostion. The feature should be processed as the first feature processed, and should be processed only when it is called. In Syriac, the character 0x0732 is a combining mark that has a dot above AND a dot below the base character. To avoid multiple glyph variants to fit all base glyphs, the character is decomposed into two glyphs...a dot above and a dot below. These two glyphs can then be correctly placed using GPOS. In Arabic it might be preferred to combine the shadda with fatha (0x0651, 0x064E) into a ligature before processing shapes. This allows the font vendor to do special handling of the mark combination when doing further processing without requiring larger contextual rules.

JIS90 Forms

Tag: jp90

Function: This feature replaces Japanese glyphs from the JIS78 or JIS83 specifications with the corresponding forms from the JIS X 0208-1990 (JIS90) specification. The user would invoke this feature to replace kanji character U+555E with U+5516.

NLC Kanji Forms

Tag: nlck

Function: The National Language Council (NLC) of Japan has defined new glyph shapes for a number of JIS characters. The 'nlck' feature is used to access those glyphs.

Ruby Notation Forms

Tag: ruby

Function: Japanese typesetting often uses smaller kana glyphs, generally in superscripted form, to clarify the meaning of kanji which may be unfamiliar to the reader. These are called ruby, from the old typesetting term for four-point-sized type. This feature identifies glyphs in the font which have been designed for this use, substituting them for the default designs. The user applies this feature to the kana character U+3042, to get the ruby form for annotation.

These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in d

Tag: Basic Latin

Function: These fonts support the Basic Latin character set. Each font is Unicode™ encoded, and available in different formats. Please review the product information for each font to ensure it will meet your requirements.

Tag: lowercase

Function:

Tag: uppercase

Function: