“hope someone can help me!”
As far as I know, and this idea has been nixed by the OT partners for 15 years, there is no desire on the part of the owners of OT to allow TT fonts to contain potentially dangerous software like that which is required to do what you desire.
Cheers!

You can get a pseudo-random effect using OT features, have a look at this discussion (in German, I think you understand it?) for hints on how to do it.

Jens

i tried the feature “substitue from ” , putting all my A-variants in a glyphclass
it works. BUT IN INDESIGN IT ALWAYS JUST TAKES THE VARIANT THAT IS FIRST IN THE LIST OF THE CLASS.

this is how the the “sub from” syntax works.
there is no way to get “real” randomness in OpenType (unless you somehow build your own plugin for the application, that does what you desire) but you can acheive some level of pseudo randomness.

there are several threads here on typophile discussing how to achieve this effect, i’ll let you wade through them yourself:
http://www.google.com/search?q=random+site%3Atypophile.com

if you want someone to implement this for you, you might contact tal leming

ok, thanks!
that’s helpful - i’m reading the discussions you linked me to.

question back to paul:
to build my own plugin, what kind of programming language and software is needed for that?
not that i dare to try it myself, but i have some programming-skilled students around here that could help me.
would that be a fontlab-plugin or an indesign-plugin?

johnny

It would be an InDesign plug-in. You’ll need the InDesign SDK, and it uses C++ according to the docs on Adobe’s site. You’ll need either Visual Studio 2006 (Windows) or XCode (Mac).

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

thanks to all you experts!
I’m making good progress with my font thanks to this discussion

oh yeah? which route did you take?

doing a cycle like thomas phinneys first example: http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@755.561rfSM0Gas.1@.3bbc5ea4
that’s the direction of the fourth result in the google-search you suggested, and tal lemmings suggestion at the same time. (he advised me to do this after i emailed him quickly for advice and information about his possibilities in implementing. as you probably know he has a licensed robust random simulation algorithm - encouraged me to solve it myself though as a student. that’s also my aim and challenge actually.

glad to hear it man. i actually think the most interesting thing about achieving pseudo randomness is the challenge of trying different ways to achieve it and finding what works best.

that’s surely right.
my time is a bit short to try many ways, but this i will surely do with the font later on.
for now i need some suitable “randomness” or alternative behavior for the presentation of my font in 10 days. parallel to that i also work on the lettershapes itself again - as the whole thing is about the different negative spaces i get through the alternative glyphs. my font is for posters, large type size.
so now that i know i can get the alternatives in there, I’m doing more letterdrawing again to precisely work on the font’s specialty of those variable spaces.
could imagine that in the end i take it out of pseudo-randomness to control (that might seem random) with lots of contextual glyph sub scripting - so that interesting spaces will happen that i explore now (also through the randomization)