Opentype Random Feature

Design
1

Hello,
I’m creating an all caps font, which will have another .calt variation. I’m looking to create a feature that will automatically randomly select characters when typing.

The thing is it only has 3 variations (A-Z + a-z + A-Z.calt) any help on how to make this work randomly? It should mix between ALL of them for both Uppercases and Lowercases.

Thank you,
Eduardo

2

Have a look at this tutorial:

3

Thank you Florian. I will take a look at this tutorial.

4

Hello Florian, I looked into the tutorial and seems like the tutorial is explaining how to substitute some pairs with different pairs, not repeating consecutive characters or pairs. What I really wanted was a complete randomness.

Like every time I typed “A” it would randomly choose between A, a, A.ss01 and a.ss01, and this for all the letters. This could be “turned on” with contextual alternates for easy usage. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Ed

5

Complete randomness is not possible, you need to emulate it with techniques like described in the linked article.

6

There actually is the rand feature and you can add lines with this lookup type:

sub a from [a a.1 a.2 a.3];

However this is badly supported in apps. To my knowledge there are only two or three apps that actually do.

7

Thank you Sebastian and Rainer. I appreciate the feedback. I’ll see what I can do to solve this.

8

Your best guess is the circles of replacement in the tutorial above. It will look random to a person reading your font.