The long s substitution should be in hist, not hlig.

hlig is really for ct and st ligs. You do however also need a "long s + s" lig, as you have discovered. That might as well go in regular old liga, since if you've already got the long s in there, you want it to be a default ligature.

The long s + s ligature is also the origin of the German double s character (eszett).

Cheers,

T

Note that long s + i, long s plus f, and double-long-s are all also helpful.

Although there are plenty of OT experts on Typophile, there's a dedicated OpenType mailing list as well. Just send an email to get on it.

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thnx again for your help, thom. now i have more questions...

what does the "long s + s" lig actually look like/consist of?
when is it used?
I was actually aware of the origin of the eszett, but the long s followed by the short s looks funny in English. What i'd like to happen is for the substitution to be ignored when two s's fall at the end of the word, is that where the "long s + s" lig comes in?

More about OT programming... what is the best way to get up to speed in learning some of the more complicated stuff? and learning about such tricks as special ligatures? is that all on the OT FDK forums? Are there any other resources on the web or in print that i can get my hands on? I'm aware of Adobe's forum, that Microsoft has quite about about font development on their pages and that there is another forum for OT development on MSN... am i just not taking good enough advantage of these resources? is there something i'm missing here? any insight/explanation of these resources (and others i may have missed) would help a lot. thanks again for your help.

VOLT... that must be the MSN group i'm thinking of...

Hmmm. I'm not sure I can describe it really easily.

Huh. I just went to look at it in one of our glyph complement PDFs, and it seems that isn't a ligature in Adobe Jenson Pro (although there are a ton of long s ligatures). I wonder if I am completely hallucinating this.... It isn't as if I've done any work in this genre myself in the last 5-6 years.

As for the OT programming aspect, this forum is pretty good. The FontLab forum on MSN is good. The OT mailing list is decent. The VOLT forum isn't bad. There are also occasional workshops and stuff at type conferences.

T

i got it to work just how i wanted to with this:

feature hist { # Historical Forms
# Latin
lookup hist0 {
sub s' @class3 by longs;
} hist0;
lookup hist1 {
sub longs' s by s;
} hist1;
} hist;

i guess i was too tired to come up with this last nite, i needed some additional help from you, thom. i figgered if using an s_s lig would work this above would work too.

There are also occasional workshops and stuff at type conferences.
Too bad i won't join you all at typecon this year... maybe next! i hope all of you that make it to sanfran this next week have a loverly time while i fly overhead on my way to seattle. ;^)

Paul,

I don't think it's a good idea to incorporate contextual substitutions of the long-s. Depending on the language used, the rules were very different. So for English, the rules are fairly simple, but for example for German, they aren't. The short s is not only used at the end of words, but also, in compound words, the short s is used where a prefix or a stem ends. For example, in "ansteigen" (because it's "an|steigen"), you would have a long s but in "austrinken" you would have a short s (as it's "aus|trinken"). Similarly, there are special rules for French, or Polish, or other languages that used long s in the past.

Therefore, it's impossible to build a proper universal contextual substitution mechanism. IMVHO, it doesn't make sense to make rules that would only work in one language (e.g. English) but perhaps actually break other languages.

As for the correct form of a ligature long s + short s, I do recommend to look at _well-designed_ sharp s (

Thomas, does the OT mailing list have an archive?

I don't *think* so, but I'm not sure. It recently moved (formerly on Topica). The previous version had an archive, but I can't find one for the new version.

T

Is it possible to access the old archive?

hey adam,
thanks for enlightening me further on the troubles with automated long s substitutions. but i thought with OT one could implement different rules for different languages? how does the hist feature work anyway? is it automatic? or does it work more like the salt function where the user has to select the long s from from a glyph palete? or is it sometimes automatic?

Paul,

there is no such thing as "how does the hist feature work anyway" ;) Application developers may choose several ways to implement the feature.

The OpenType specification:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_fj.htm#hist
says that the feature should work as a GSUB lookup type 1, i.e. a simple substitution. This means that contextual substitutions should not be used.

Microsoft's Longhorn OpenType Layout implementation enumerates HinstoricalForms as "boolean" so it will be just an on/off function, just like ligatures in InDesign.
http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/graphicsmm/overviews/text/typography_ovw.aspx

AFAIK, Adobe InDesign doesn't currently support the "hist" feature other than by the Glyphs palette, but may add an "on/off" support in future.

It is possible to implement different substitutions rules for different languages. However, (1) the OpenType specification recommends using only GSUB lookup type 1, i.e. simple substitutions (not contextual substitutions) for the feature. (2) As I explained earlier, a properly working contextual "hist" feature for many languages would be simply impossible to build, just like a properly working contextual ligatures feature that would substitute "fi" or "fl" ligatures -- in German, you are allowed to put the "fl" ligature in "anfliegen" but not in "auflegen", because the former is "an|fliegen" and the latter is "auf|legen". You are not allowed to put ligatures between a prefix and a stem. Supporting this in an automatic way would require dictionary support so it's not really possible to solve it within a font.

Therefore, I recommend implementing the "hist" feature just using a simple substitution:

sub s by long

and let the user turn it on and off locally where required.

Regards,
Adam

there is no such thing as "how does the hist feature work anyway"

i realised this as i thought about it a bit longer yesterday. thanks for taking your time to make sure i really understand this issue. anyway a simple "sub s by long s" is a lot easier to implement.
and who needs a workshop when you've got Adam T. to answer all your silly questions. ;^) thanks again!

and i've got another question... is "Longhorn" the next generation of Windows? or did i get that wrong too?

I do not know what the legit method of implementation is, but I got the ligature subsitutions to work the way I have see it most often done by programming a series of substitutions in the calt feature. (I used calt because that is one that is easily accessible in InDesign.) Of course, I am free to program this however I want since this font is only for personal use anyway, so my method might not be appropriate for you. Let me know if you want to see how I wrote the subs.

Hi J P,

It's perhaps a bit late, but I would like to see your subs because it looks great.

Thnx,
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