Hey Folks,

This is my first post here at typophile. I've been working for a long time trying to create a new font for the Rocky Horror community to use for their advertising. There already exists one font, Double Feature, that emulates the Rocky Horror credits, but I have found that it gets a little stale as there is only one alternate for each letterform, or sometimes none at all. In the actual credits everything was hand drawn, so every single character is different. I wanted to create a font that has at least four alternates for each character and allows a designer to immediately cycle through them without having to individually alter settings for each. To accomplish this I used and abused ligatures.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have it set up so that upper and lowercase characters are identical. My ligatures are set up so that a letter just has to be tapped repeatedly to cycle though the alternate options. In the case that the designer actually needs to repeat a letter they would have to switch between upper and lower case for the characters. This is probably a crude way of doing things, but it is working out how I envisioned.

I have hit a problem though. I also created alternate characters for the numbers, and had imagined to use them the same way, so that tapping either 1 or ! would first cycle through the "1" options and then set an exclamation point. However when I write the ligature code and attempt to compile with either numbers or symbols I receive errors. Is there any way to make them work, or could someone recommend a different way of achieving this?

Also, as I was searching around the forums to see if anyone had tried anything similar I noticed that the recommendation for naming ligatures is to either put an underscore or a period between the characters. Is this vital? As you can see my ligatures currently are just named A2, A3, A4 etc., and I haven't yet noticed and complications but I'd like to change it now if it is necessary.

Cheers!
Shawn