I want to combine the Helvetica with my own letter designs. Where I (for example) have 30 variants for each letter, but the main font will be Helvetica. Ideally I’d like to have one randomized letter in a 5 letter word. So for example; HeLLO. The ‘e’ would be a different font, the other 4 letters would be Helvetica.
I found about Contextual Alternates, but that would work for all 5 letters all the time. Is there a possibility to code something that says ‘1 in 5 letters is an alternate’?
There’s the rand feature but that’s hardly supported. And you cannot have it random but at the same time controlled so that it will only appear once per line or word.
This is more of a scripting work in InDesign, Illustrator, or DrawBot. Better to forget achieving all that within a font file (especially if you want to include Helvetica glyphs in your file which violates the user license agreement).
