I am designing a typeface for a client who has asked me if it’s possible to program it in such a way that it always “pushes” the first letter of a line of text all the way to the left side of the bounding box in Illustrator/InDesign. Essentially this means that the type should ignore the left sidebearing of the first character of each sentence.
The reason the client (a design studio) wants this feature is so that they can easier line the type and design-elements up in their grid-systems.
What would you say is the easiest way to program the font to recognise when there is a line-break and adjust the LSB of the first character of each line to zero?
You can do that but it will only work in very specific setting. It is not possible to say shift the letter if it is at the beginning of the line Just that at the beginning of a block And a new block can start in the middle of the line, after you switched fonts or sizes. But if it is for a specific client you can tell them to how to avoid this.
The OpenType feature code would look something like this. Put it in a user accessible feature (like stylistic set) that the user can disable it if it shows up in the wrong place.
ignore pos @All A';
pos A' <-142 0 -142 0>;
This is how it looks. The first line is the default, the second with the activated feature.
