How can I suppress the automatic generation of the mark feature?

1

I tried adding a mark feature, empty, with and without “active”. Surprisingly, Glyphs still adds the mark feature automatically. Why is this? Is there a different way to achieve this?

2

Does adding a Remove Features parameter with mark work?

3

Thanks a lot, this works!

4

Out of curiosity, why suppress mark? You need it, even in a Latin-only context, for Dutch, Guaraní and Lithuanian.

5
  1. For development and debugging purposes. To check the amount of data occupied by kerning, and to see whether it is the kerning that causes a subtable overflow, and to measure the data size of the mark feature (by comparing fonts with and without).
  2. Sometimes the font maker is the only user, and the usage is known very well in advance, sometimes even the precise text. Example: Just Another Foundry – JAF Lapture, where the webfonts only contain the necessary data for the sample texts. In that case, I generated the mini webfonts via script anyway, but I hope we can agree that generally speaking, scenarios exist in which the usage of a font is very predictable, and we know in advance whether mark is necessary or not. “You need it for Dutch” is a rather bold statement.
  3. As a general principle, unexpected behaviour is never good, and if Glyphs generates the feature even though the user’s intention is clearly to omit it then you’d rather have a very good reason for it.
1 Like
6

Point taken, 1 and 2 are about subsetting. If you suppress export of *comb glyphs too, you won’t have mark or mkmk.

Not sure what you mean by point 3. Would you not expect mark if you have combining marks in your font?

Modern Dutch keyboard layouts (including the ones in iOS) have a key that generates j+acutecomb. Could be worked around with a ligature too, I guess, but mark is probably the better solution.

7

Go to Font Info > Features, add a feature mark, uncheck “Generate feature automatically”, and leave it empty.

The expected behaviour is that the exported font does not have a mark feature.

8

A manually added mark feature is just that, a manually added mark feature. The “Generate automatically” checkbox doesn’t do anything in this case (probably should disable it).
Adding a feature like this is meant to be able to add custom feature code in addition to the automatic one.