Presumably you want to only perform these substitutions when the input string is not directly preceded or followed by another letter, otherwise you'll get the substitutions happening in words like ‘mandible’.

I don't think there is a problem with implementing the same substitution in more than one feature so long as there is a reasonable interpretation of the purpose of the features. I would be inclined to use dlig rather than salt, though.

John,
How would you insure that the substitutions only take place where a space breaks the string. Would you change the code to:

sub A n d [space period comma] by AND.catch;

but then you would delete the space? Is there a word end and begin code? It seems there must be for Arabic where different forms exist in different parts of a word?

ChrisL

Chris, I'd attack the problem as John suggests, from the other way. Make am OT Class @lettersonly, and ignore sub when this is adjacent to the target string. That way "mANDible" is ignored, whilst "'The...'" would be.

ignore sub @lettersonly A N D ;
ignore sub A N D @lettersonly ;
sub A N D by AND.catch;

- - -
Whoops, that didn't work. Not sure how to ignore a string of letters:
ignore sub @lettersonly A' N' D';

Help?

Interesting John, dlig for everything? I also have s and c dligs. Seems weird to have catchwords in their too?

Nevermind. I forgot to put me primes (') on!

ignore sub @lettersonly A' N' D' ;
ignore sub A' N' D' @lettersonly ;
sub A' N' D' by AND.catch ;

I guess your syntax was prime evil, Randy :-)

ChrisL

Yes, what Randy says.

I don't use FL or the Adobe FDK for OTL work, so I can never remember without looking what the syntax is. In VOLT terms:

A N D -> AND.catch
EXCEPT |
EXCEPT |

Calling the glyph "AND.catch" is not a good idea. It's definitely recommended to use the Adobe-compatible glyph naming syntax (which in this case would be "A_N_D.catch").

Cheers,
Adam

Thanks Adam. I'm guessing the benefit is that adobe apps recognize these glyphs as ligs in some special way?

I think that the underscore helps separate the ligs back as letters for PDF text reading.

ChrisL

Yes, if you name your glyph A_N_D.catch then Acrobat will be able to find the glyph in a PDF* if the user searches for the text "AND". If you use a name AND.catch, then Acrobat will "think" that it is just an unknown glyph.

I recommend reading the Glyph Naming and Encoding chapter of the FontLab Studio 5 user's manual.

*) This only applies to some PDFs, depending on the way they were created. In some scenarios, Acrobat will still find AND.catch, but the name A_N_D.catch is safer and works in more occasions.

Cheers,
Adam

Changing the names now...
Read the manual? *Sigh* Guilty as charged. Thx guys.

GO Randy! :-)

ChrisL