Automatic features

[alx]

Hey guys, I’m remastering an old font and need to clarify a few things.

1. The (auto) aalt feature doesn’t include liga nor dlig, is this intentional?

2. In the locl feature I used to put something like
   language AZE exclude_dflt; # Azeri sub i by idotaccent;

Glyphs omits “exclude_dflt”, any particular reason for this?

3. Also, is there a reason why TRK for example comes before AZE?

4. In frac I used to put sub one.osf slash two.osf by onehalf;

Is there any good reason not to do it?

5. Automatic salt duplicates ss01 only, can I force it to append other sets as well?

6. I use a dlig sub hyphen greater by rightArrow; I guess there is no way to automate it, other than renaming the glyph hyphen_greater?

I’m trying to move to better OT practices including as much automation in Glyphs as possible, so your replies are greatly appreciated

[mekkablue (Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer)]

@alx

• The (auto) aalt feature doesn’t include liga nor dlig, is this intentional?

Yes. aalt is supposed to only contain one-to-one substitutions.

@alx

1. In the locl feature I used to put something like
   language AZE exclude_dflt; # Azeri sub i by idotaccent;

Glyphs omits “exclude_dflt”, any particular reason for this?

There is no reason to have an exclude_dflt directive, because the feature starts with a script and a language statement. IOW, there is nothing exclude_dflt could exclude. Quoting the AFDKO spec:

There are two levels of default lookups. Rules specified between the start of a feature definition and the first script are added to all language-systems, unless a language statement specifies the exclude_dflt keyword. Rules specified between the occurrence of the script statement and the first language statement other than dflt are added to explicitly specified languages for the current script, but not to other scripts, nor to other languages of the same script that are not named in the feature. If your font has several languages for a given script, and you need language specific rules for only some of the languages, you should still explicitly name all of the languages so that they will inherit the script-level default rules.

@alx

3. In frac I used to put sub one.osf slash two.osf by onehalf;
   Is there any good reason not to do it?

There is no reason to do that unless you move frac after onum, but that would not make sense.

@alx

• Automatic salt duplicates ss01 only, can I force it to append other sets as well?

Many fonts only have one stylistic set, and for those cases, salt is automated that way. If you ant something else, you will need to deactivate automation, and code or script your own.

@alx

5. I use a dlig sub hyphen greater by rightArrow; I guess there is no way to automate it, other than renaming the glyph hyphen_greater?

Should not be in a feature in the first place (hence not automated), because this is a problem of the input method and/or layout engine. Still, many fonts have something like this, and if you want to do something similar, please put it in dlig.

[alx]

Concise as always, thank you Rainer! Now I can go to sleep. (I hope you sleep sometimes too )

[mekkablue (Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer)]

Occasionally.