Typophile

Help needed

rhorea

Hello

I am new here and also new to fonts creating,
I just registered because I want to create a (smart) font but I'm not sure how to do it.

The font will be only UPPERCASE characters, that I will create in Illustrator and then paste in Fontlab, and I want to create multiple character instances/glyphs for every letter, and basically rename them A, A1, A2, A3, ... X, X1, X2, X3, and so on. The differences between these Xs for examples would be that:
X is the regular X
X1 is the regular X with a _ (line) added on the bottom left corner ( _X )
X2 is the regular X with that line on the top left corner
X3 is the X with both lines on the left.

The purpose of these characters is that when I type LX, the font to automatically replace the X with X1 in this case, so the L is joined with X due to that bottom line;
Also if after that TX (TX2 actually) I type another X, the font to change this new X with X3 in order to be linked to the previous X (X2 actually) perfectly by two lines now (X3 has one line on top left and another line on bottom left corner).

Basically I think this needs to be something like the fi substitution but I've never done this before, and not sure how I can set up my glyphs and create the syntax to change only the i from f i instead of replacing the whole f i with a new fi glyph.

I hope I was clear enough, any help/suggestion is greatly appreciated, Thank you.

mikej

You are looking for 'Alternates' within a font. You should read about how to construct ligatures in fontlab and you will be fine to do some alternates.

cheers!

rhorea

Hello, and thank you for reply,
Since I started this thread, I kept reading the forum, and I think I will need to use the 'calt' feature or the 'dlig' feature for discretionary ligatures, but I am NOT sure, and don't know how; I want to create all the characters in Illustrator (A-Z, and for all of them the rest of instances a1 a2 a3 b1 b2 b3 and so on), put them in fontlab and create some kind of algorythm that automatically replaces when I type ABCDE with A B1 C2 D2 E2 (following the example from my first post). But I don't know how to import/name all these a1 a2 ..-> z3 in fontlab and how to create/write the calt or dlig syntax(?) in the opentype dialog box.
I will also search for alternates within a font, thank you.

mikej

check this video, maybe can help:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZeBabRQaAE

rhorea

thank you for the link, this may solve my problem, but here is another question then:
will the code work this way:

sub f x by f x1;

?

where f is normal F , X normal X, and X1 is _X (another glyph with the same X just with a line added on the left bottom part: _X)

?

thank you!

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