Integrate code from one feature to another

1

Is there a way to add code from one OT Feature to another?
It’s seems that only aalt can use :

feature xxx;

I’m looking to try a workflow to build Stylistic Sets usings multiple Character Variant features.
For example, I would like to generate the code for my .ss01 by merging code from .cv01
, .cv02 and .cv03

2

You cannot integrate code from automatically generated features. If the cv## code is manually written, you can wrap the sub … by … rules in a lookup block (lookup XYZ { … } XYZ;) and then invoke that block in other features like so:

lookup XYZ;

where XYZ is a placeholder for a more descriptive lookup name.

3

Could it be possible to add an option to not have to wrap OT code in lookup for that ?

I have a project where one of its stylistic sets is a merge of many.
For example, ss04 = ss01 + ss02 + ss03, where ss01, ss02, and ss03 are autogenerated.

In my export process, for some instances, I need to remove glyphs from these three stylistic sets, and this is not a problem because they are autogenerated. However, for ss04, it is really boring because I have to manually copy and paste code from the others and then manually remove lines where a removed glyph is involved.

Something like that could be really helpful :

include (ss01, ss02, ss03)
4

The issue is that a feature like ss01 could consist of multiple lookups. That is not common, but possible. And then you cannot include the feature in another by referencing a single lookup. Thus, Glyphs cannot simply expose a lookup for each automatically generated feature.

Still, the need for this does come up from time to time, so we will look into offering something that makes this more seamless.

5

Even if ss01 is autogenerated ?

6

Difficult to say “absolutely never” since different scripts might require more complex substitutions for some pairs. Plus, lookups are optimized on exports, and that adds a lot of additional uncertainty. Even if I could formally proof that autogenerated ss## features will always use just a single lookup, then there would be other uses cases where this special handling would not work. So it’s better to find a general solution.

7

Maybe it could be something at the Glyphs level, executed at export like:

  1. Extract feature tags from include(ss01,ss02,ss03)
  2. Copy the feature.code from each of these
  3. Paste it into the mother feature
  4. Remove include(ss01,ss02,ss03) from the initial feature.code

But I guess this is not the most optimised solution, since it will generate duplicate code instead of re-using lookups.

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