Localized forms

Are these Glyphs can be added automatically to the “localized forms” table ?

sub space by space-ar;
sub quotedblleft by quotedblleft-ar;
sub quotedblright by quotedblright-ar;
sub quoteleft by quoteleft-ar;
sub quoteright by quoteright-ar;

Add a .loclARA and it should work.

Thanks mekkablue
The way work efficiently

script latn;
language ENG;
sub quotedblleft by quotedblleft.loclENG;
sub quotedblright by quotedblright.loclENG;
sub quoteleft by quoteleft.loclENG;
sub quoteright by quoteright.loclENG;
sub space by space.loclENG;

Asking when does it become necessary using Localized Forms;
Was not clear to me in reference to:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/languagetags.htm

Though when looking at multi-lingual fonts that share certain glyphs for more than one language, such as:
SPACE, period, question mark, numbers etc. … I guess that Localized Forms need arises from the users perspective; and sometimes as a designer need.
I wish you mekkablue elaborate further to what you’ve written in the manual concerning OT feature .locl.

Not quite sure what you mean. What do you need to know about locl? Simply put, it allows for language-specific alternates in software that allows setting your language and respects the locl feature. So, it will, e.g., work in Adobe InDesign with the languages it supports, but not in TextEdit, because you cannot specify a language there.

A glyph called x.loclENG will auto-create an English language feature that replaces x with x.loclENG. It applies to English, but not to Italian, French, German. And it will work in software that allows to specify English as a language, and apply that setting to selected text.

I thought the .locl feature does contribute also in the design aspect, where shared glyphs; for example:
A bilingual latin-Hebrew font share Decimal Digits for both languages and share Space and other Marks;
in certain cases the designer may want to split the mutual glyphs into two … one for each script;
should it be resolved by an OT feature or adding {-hb} to new glyph names?

There is indeed a problem with the difference between script and language. In the case of Hebrew it is easy because you only need to take care of one language, and you can get away with .loclIWR. In the case of other scripts, it is more difficult, because you need to cover more languages per script.

Adding a script tag like -hb constitutes a new glyph name, and may require adding that info to the glyph data. But AFAIK, it will not automate any features for you. Having said that, if you have suggestions that are common and should be automated, we are more than happy to hear them. Is space something that should have alternates for IWR and ARA?

I try to make it clear again … in Multi-script typefaces a designer may need to differentiate between shared glyphs… it is not a fixed rule, creating separate sets of Decimal Digits, punctuations, and even SPACE for Hebrew other than the Latin.

It is not automated in Glyphs, but you can add a space-ar, then you add the substitution after the script statement:

script arab;
sub space by space-ar;
1 Like