How to substitute two letters for alternates rather than a ligature

Martin Silvertant19 December 2014 · 07:38

I continued working on this handwritten typeface and while I made alternates to replace double vowels before, I would prefer to replace both vowels individually.

So, right now I have the following feature:
sub a a by a_a;

/a_a features two variants on /a that are both different from the default /a. Essentially what I want to do is replace /a /a by /a.alt1 and /a.alt2 instead of /a_a, because I want to maintain the ability to apply tracking to all the letters.

Now, I actually have this feature working with the following code:
sub a' a by a.alt1;
sub a.alt1 a' by a.alt2;

However, this doesn't seem to be the most beautiful solution and I'm not sure if there are instances where this feature won't work appropriately. Is there a better solution than this? Can it be done with only one line?

George Thomas19 December 2014 · 14:55

Can it be done with only one line?

No. Feature code has some real limitations. I did a connecting script this year and discovered just how much feature code won't do in certain situations. To me that's a real shortcoming since connecting scripts with alternates have been around for well over a hundred years.

Martin Silvertant19 December 2014 · 16:20

I suppose this has no bearing on what you're talking about, but just to clarify, the typeface I'm currently working on is not a connected script. It's more akin to Comic Sans.

So is the feature code I'm working with now (the second example) proper?

K Cerulean Pease19 December 2014 · 17:57

Yeah, that's how it's done. You should probably add "sub a.alt2 a' by a.alt1;" so that if there are, say, seven a's in a row, the last is not noticeably the odd one out.

Martin Silvertant19 December 2014 · 21:45

Good idea. Thanks!

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