Correct way to use mekkablue's "Baseline Wiggle?"

I’m designing a font for comics, and I wanted to experiment with a pseudo-random baseline to make the text a bit bouncy. I assume that’s the purpose of “Baseline Wiggle”? So far I haven’t been able to get it to do anything. The script creates a “titl” feature and a “wiggle” class that has all my characters. There are no errors when I click compile and update. However, I can’t see the feature in the Preview pane, and the feature does not seem to make its way to my exported font. (If I open the .otf in Glyphs there’s no longer a “titl” feature listed.) Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated!

1 Like

Actually, it looks like the wiggle did get saved, and seems to do what I expected, but so far the only app where I can see it is Georg’s TextPreview app. Photoshop can show Titling alternates, but apparently not the wiggle.

Also, I tried some older versions of Glyphs, and it seems that up till 2.4.4 “Titling” was an option in the preview pane. Was its removal in 2.5 intentional?

1 Like

Actually, “Titling” is still there, just not for the wiggle code. I did a simple test titl feature and I can preview that. So I guess there’s just something about the code the Baseline Wiggle script creates that Glyphs just isn’t happy with. Thanks for following along as I troubleshoot in real time. :slight_smile:

Glyphs cannot preview GPOS features. So you will have to try it in the apps you intend it for. titl Is just a suggestion. If the intended app does not support, you can also put it in another feature.

1 Like

Thanks Rainer. In your experience are the results of Baseline Wiggle supported in many apps? In other words, if it doesn’t show up in Photoshop or Illustrator, where I’ve turned on “Titling Alternates,” am I doing something wrong, or is it just one of those things that’s not well-supported?

They should work in Adobe apps. Did you compile features before you exported?

Yep! I’m stumped. Like I say, I can see the wiggle in textPreview.app, but not in Adobe products. My contextual alternates and ligatures work great. I’ll keep playing and see if anything sticks.

Possible that PS and AI do not support GPOS in titl, because they expect GSUB there. Perhaps try a different feature, that typically is GPOS, like kern or dist.

Thanks for the tips. Learning a lot here. I’m finding so far that none of the Opentype features implemented in PS or Illustrator support single character positioning. However using the kern feature it happily works in other programs like TextEdit, and, most importantly for me, in my favorite iPad drawing app, Procreate, where I plan to use this font the most.

bouncy

2 Likes

Thanks for reporting back! Useful information for future users.

7 years ago, I made a similar thing using GPOS in ssXX features. This was cool because ss01, ss02 etc. are additive, so you could have wiggle and more wiggle and more wiggle. Unfortunately, at that time, the Microsoft text engine simply did not execute stylistic sets in the GPOS table, so my wiggling worked in some apps but not others. The fonts and the code are here:

If anyone would be kind to use them to check the support of GPOS-based stylistic sets in today’s apps, including browsers, it’d be useful. I’ll move my thing to a Github repo at some point.

I think that is a real pity that for many features, especially user-controllable features, some text engine vendors expect some of them to be GSUB-only or GPOS-only or both.

It’s short-sighted, and the wiggle thing (which, as you can see, was very dear to me :slight_smile: ) is a splendid example of said short-sightedness.

I’ve voiced this problem a few times, and I think now, if more type designers also raised it, there might be chances that those implicit and unnecessary limitations could be lifted, especially that we now have variable fonts, so implementing GPOS-based stylistic sets (or other features) is not at all an unthinkable idea.

1 Like

Cool! At some point I will dive deeper. I did just do 1 quick test putting the wiggle into a stylistic set, and found that, unlike kern, it unfortunately did not display in TextEdit.

Hever heard of dist before how is that accessed in PS?
Having the same issue with getting the wiggle to work in adobe PS latest…
the titling alternates not functioning tried kern instead also no luck,

any ideas?