.init and .fina doesn't work anymore

Glyphs
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1

Hi!

I’m not sure why my .init and .fina features no longer work in Glyphs. They were working this morning, but now they don’t anymore (when I activate those, all my concerned letters turn into .fina or .init) . Do you have any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks a lot!

2

Where do you test this and can you show your feature code?

3

Thanks for your answer.
I really don’t know why it doesn’t work anymore.
I even tried to re-install the app, and it still doesn’t work.
Here are some screenshots for you to have a look.

Thanks a lot!

Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.31
Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.313680×2262 435 KB

Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.45
Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.451924×1224 182 KB

Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.42
Capture d’écran 2025-12-23 à 11.42.421924×1224 182 KB

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4
  1. the unit/medi/fina are only supported for Arabic (and some similar scripts). So you can’t use it for English/Latin script.
  2. the feature preview in Glyphs isn’t a proper OpenType engine. So you always need to test outside of Glyphs (in a browser, Indesign or FontGoggles).
5

Thanks for your reply.

The .init and .fina features were working perfectly until yesterday, so I really don’t understand what’s going on. I was able to export the font without any issue and everything worked fine in .otf.
Now it’s no longer the case, and I honestly don’t get why… it almost feels like Glyphs suddenly decided it no longer supports these features.

In case you have any idea why it’s behaving this way, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

Best
Pierre

6

In what app/environment did it work? Did you happen to update Glyphs? Do you have an old .otf that works?

7

Georg is right about init/fina. For Latin, you need to put these into calt. See the Positional Alternates tutorial. There is also a mekkablue script that will create the code for you.

8

Yes, I think I understand what happened.

I accidentally updated the Glyphs app today by buying CleanMyMac (it seems to auto-update software by default).

I was working on an older version of Glyphs, so I think that’s why it doesn’t work the way it did before.

(I actually thought that .init and .fina were for Latin too :see_no_evil_monkey:.)

Thanks for your answer,

I’ll try what you suggested using .calt and mekkablue.

Best

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