Opentype features for symbol font

[bastian]

Hello

I wanted to ask if someone could give me a recommendation for OT features for a specific case?

I’m working on a symbol font which I want to make more usable for basic users.

I want to offer the user two convenience features:

„shortcodes“
user can enter a name in colons which will be substituted by the image

and

„combinations“
a symbol should be able to be combined with a semiotic symbol like + walking man =

For this i considered that mark attachment would work best with a center mark because some symbols might be wider and some might be slimmer. I’m not sure if the mark attachement feature can be applied for Symbols and emoji actually. do you know if this could work?

Could someone please advise me which feature would suit best for those two cases?

thanks and kind regards,
basti

[GeorgSeifert]

The first would be:

sub colon m a n colon by man; # name of the "man" glyph 

but be aware that this is very English centric. This case might be easy enough, but not all names are so easy and non English speaking people might have problems.

For the second: Mark attachment would be a good idea if the base glyphs have different widths. Set the stroke glyphs to be “Mark”+“Nonspacing”. and add a “_center” (or whatever you prefer, as long as it is only an underscore + basic latin letters

And in all base glyph add a “center” anchor.

Edit: I just saw that you need to type the stroke/bar first. So you need to put the “_center” anchor in the “image” glyph and the “center” in the stroke. And mark the image glyphs as “Mark”. That might make it tricky in other places.

So you might need to use a different strategy: set the bar glyphs to zero width so that the outlines are sticking out to the right. If the positioning is off, use Kerning.