There is something rather annoying to me. I often need to kern, say seen-ar and alefMaksura-ar (this might not seem non-sensational as these two can’t possibly be next to each other, but trust me they do in my fonts). Glyphs will, quite helpfully, turn these two into seen-ar.init and alefMaksura-ar.fina but that is not what I want so I can’t really visualize the kerning here.
Basically, I need some sort of a dump kerning view that will show exactly the glyphs I selected with no substitution of any kind applied to them.
In this font (and another font), spcing between words is the same as spacing inside the word, so e.g. /waw-ar/alef-ar should be exactly the same as /waw-ar/space/alef-ar. I do this by turning space into a mark glyph. This means combinations that would normally be separated by space will now be effectively next to each other and need to be kerned (the space glyph will still be there, but ignored since it is a mark glyph).
Renaimg works but tedious since I have tens of these. There is no ligature to remove, Glyphs is replacing /seen-ar/alefMaksura-ar by /seen-ar.init/alefMaksura-ar.fina, regardless of what OpenType features I have (as it matter if fact, it can’t actually compile my features as the code is incomplete and built externally, so it must be hard-coding these substitutions).
You lost me. You cannot kern waw with alef because of the positional substitutions? If you type waw followed by alef (وا), they don’t substitute, do they?
Some pairs are not problematic, like وا other pairs are, like نا. I basically need to be able to kern any pair of Arabic glyphs, but Glyphs will not allow me to do that unless I use names it does not recognize.
