Try chancing the order of OT codes in that left hand column, and see what happens.

First come, first served.

It's not really an OT order thing so much as a group-replace function.

If I were to type "international" and I wanted it to force "int'l" to replace it, with each letter being an independent glyph, how could (or can I at all) do that?

I want a group of letters in a particular order to be replaced by a different group of letters in a different particular order, not necessarily of the same count for each group.

Can it be done?

Have no idea if the following will help you

"mergeFonts
This program will merge glyphs from one font into another, optionally copying a subset from the source fonts, and changing the names of the glyphs. It can also be used to subset and change the glyph names in a font. By using the same font more than once as a source with different mapping files, glyphs can be duplicated under other names."

However, just ran across it yesterday. Its part of the Adobe Font Development Kit -some utilities they made available, though not documented super well.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_overview.html

OpenType cannot do many-to-many substitutions. It can to one-to-one, one-to-one-out-of-many, many-to-one and one-to-many (though the last one is not supported by some applications).

To achieve what you're trying to do, you need a series of lookups, each performing a many-to-one substitution. Each lookup is executed on the glyph string produced by the previous lookup. So:

feature calt {
lookup calt1 {
sub c' h' a' l k by c_h_a.alt;
} calt1;
lookup calt2 {
sub c_h_a.alt l' k' by l_k.alt;
} calt2;
} calt;

Note above that I've used PDF-compatible glyphnames for ligatures. c_h_a.alt and l_k.alt will be "understood" by PDF applications while cha.alt and lk.alt will not, i.e. copy-paste or searching may not work properly.

Adam

Thanks, Adam. I figured it might me the more complicated way, I just needed the clarity/reassurance you gave.

Mcs