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.

Case-Sensitive Forms

Tag: case

Function: Shifts various punctuation marks up to a position that works better with all-capital sequences or sets of lining figures; also changes oldstyle figures to lining figures. By default, glyphs in a text face are designed to work with lowercase characters. Some characters should be shifted vertically to fit the higher visual center of all-capital or lining text. Also, lining figures are the same height (or close to it) as capitals, and fit much better with all-capital text. The user selects a block of text and applies this feature. The dashes, bracketing characters, guillemet quotes and the like shift up to match the capitals, and oldstyle figures change to lining figures.

Fractions

Tag: frac

Function: Replaces figures separated by a slash with 'common' (diagonal) fractions. The user enters 3/4 in a recipe and gets the threequarters fraction.

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.

Localized Forms

Tag: locl

Function: Many scripts used to write multiple languages over wide geographical areas have developed localized variant forms of specific letters, which are used by individual literary communities. For example, a number of letters in the Bulgarian and Serbian alphabets have forms distinct from their Russian counterparts and from each other. In some cases the localized form differs only subtly from the script 'norm', in others the forms are radically distinct. This feature enables localized forms of glyphs to be substituted for default forms. The user applies this feature to text to enable localized Bulgarian forms of Cyrillic letters; alternatively, the feature might enable localized Russian forms in a Bulgarian manufactured font in which the Bulgarian forms are the default characters.

Ordinals

Tag: ordn

Function: Replaces default alphabetic glyphs with the corresponding ordinal forms for use after figures. One exception to the follows-a-figure rule is the numero character (U+2116), which is actually a ligature substitution, but is best accessed through this feature. The user applies this feature to turn 2.o into 2.o (abbreviation for secundo).

Superscript

Tag: sups

Function: Replaces lining or oldstyle figures with superior figures (primarily for footnote indication), and replaces lowercase letters with superior letters (primarily for abbreviated French titles). The application can use this feature to automatically access the superior figures (more legible than scaled figures) for footnotes, or the user can apply it to Mssr to get the classic form.

Contextual Alternates

Tag: calt

Function: In specified situations, replaces default glyphs with alternate forms which provide better joining behavior. Used in script typefaces which are designed to have some or all of their glyphs join. In Caflisch Script, o is replaced by o.alt2 when followed by an ascending letterform.

Stylistic Alternates

Tag: salt

Function: Many fonts contain alternate glyph designs for a purely esthetic effect; these don't always fit into a clear category like swash or historical. As in the case of swash glyphs, there may be more than one alternate form. This feature replaces the default forms with the stylistic alternates. The user applies this feature to Industria to get the alternate form of g.

Historical Forms

Tag: hist

Function: Some letterforms were in common use in the past, but appear anachronistic today. The best-known example is the long form of s; others would include the old Fraktur k. Some fonts include the historical forms as alternates, so they can be used for a 'period' effect. This feature replaces the default (current) forms with the historical alternates. While some ligatures are also used for historical effect, this feature deals only with single characters. The user applies this feature in Adobe Jenson to get the archaic forms of M, Q and Z.

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.

Historical Ligatures

Tag: hlig

Function: Some ligatures were in common use in the past, but appear anachronistic today. Some fonts include the historical forms as alternates, so they can be used for a 'period' effect. This feature replaces the default (current) forms with the historical alternates. The user applies this feature using Palatino Linotype, and historic ligatures are formed for all long s forms, including: long s+t, long s+b, long s+h, long s+k, and several others.

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.

Tag: lowercase

Function:

Tag: uppercase

Function: