I am working on a hand lettering font for the first time right now and I have already designed a second set for all the uppercase letters - I somehow couldn’t find a code which switches the first letter of any sentence to this “more special” letters automatically. Please help a girl out. thank you
This isn’t possible, at least not strictly speaking. A font has no way of knowing what a sentence is. You can only substitute glyphs based on the context of other glyphs, like so:
sub a b by c;
Which would substitute the letter sequence ab by c.
You might think: hey, can’t I just say “substitute a letter preceded by a full stop followed by a space with my new letter?” and yes, you could, and it would work a lot of the time, but that’s very hacky and has two problems:
- it doesn’t take into account all contexts that could signify the start of a sentence
- it takes into account contexts where it’s not actually a start of a sentence
These two problems are impossible to solve on a font level (and shouldn’t be solved there). Use GREP in InDesign, character styles or something similar, but in any case it should be done by the layout app you use, not the font.
I’d go even further than Sebastian and say that this is not possible to do at all. Only a human can decide whether something is at the beginning of a sentence (and sometimes it’s ambiguous even to humans).