Typophile

Language statement in OT

Ramiro Espinoza

Hi there,

I am trying to understand better OT features in commercial fonts since the features I write are pretty basic.

When I check the following piece of code:

-----------------------------------------

feature dlig { # Discretionary Ligatures
# Latin
lookup dlig14 {
sub A E by AE;
sub I J by IJ;
sub O E by OE;
sub a e by ae;
sub i j by ij;
sub o e by oe;
} dlig14;

lookup dlig15 {
sub period period period by ellipsis;
} dlig15;
language AFK ; # Afrikaans
language DEU ; # German
language NLD ; # Dutch
language ROM ; # Romanian
language TRK ; # Turkish
} dlig;

-----------------------------------------

... If I understand well the substitutions asked by the lookup "dlig15" and "dlig14" will work only for the languages listed by the statements. Is that right?

Another question:
Once the font is installed, what does the OT file in order to identify the language in use? Does it check the selected keyboard?

Thanks in advance.

Ramiro.

theplatypus

I would think the keyboard is good to go with the handshake between the typeface and the hardware. But I don't know for certain.
best regards,
daniel

Beau W

In Adobe InDesign you can set the language of each paragraph of text through selecting it and setting
it's 'language'. Okay- I remember having to change this after modifying InDesign files for a catalog we were sent from Germany, so that I could spell check it.
In Illustrator- Show Options in the Character panel, then choose your language from the list at the bottom. (To change the language for just the selected type).

Now, I've had to do this for spellchecking reasons (most of the ad stuff I do has to be bilingual) but I'm not positive that OT features are picking up on this setting... Just checking the keyboard wouldn't work too well for anybody who works in more than one language.

Christian Harder

Starting with CS3 InDesign does look at the language selection in determining whether to apply OT features or not. Through version CS2, however, all it did was choose a dictionary for spell checking and hyphenation.

Having said that, there is a bug in CS3. I believe it was with the various forms of German not calling features correctly. Adobe documented that, and it was fixed in CS4.
Christian A. Harder

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