Alternating contextual alternatives

Glyphs
1

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a project where I need to alternate between two sets of glyphs for uppercase letters. One set is the regular uppercase letters (A-Z), and the other set is a stencil version (A.ss01, B.ss01, etc.).

The client wants the alternation to occur as the user types, with the regular font used for odd-positioned letters (1st, 3rd, 5th, etc.) and the stencil font used for even-positioned letters (2nd, 4th, 6th, etc.).

Here’s an example:

  • TEST would become T E.ss01 S T.ss01.

The following seems to work

sub @DEFAULT @DEFAULT’ by @ALT1;
sub @ALT1 @ALT1’ by @DEFAULT;

, but I can’t get the ETC class to work and ignore SPACE. Currently it resets the alternation when a space separates the word.

Could anyone help?

2

I’ve not tried this, but can’t you include SPACE in both @DEFAULT and @ALT1?

3

This worked thank you!

4

The “space” is handled differently in some apps, so using it in OpenType feature context doesn’t always work. So you need to test all places the font should work.

5

See the tutorial Advanced Contextual Alternates. it has an in-depth discussion.