Smart Quotes feature in Opentype

Glyphs
1

Hello Everybody,

I wanted to build in a smart quote feature and replace quotedbl by real quotes. I’ve started with a simple line of code.

# closes.
sub @All quotedbl' by quotedblright;
# opens.
sub quotedbl' @All by quotedblleft;

This works for the first open/close of a quote but then it just gives me the closing ones. You can see it on the screenshot. Do you have any suggestions for me?

Also would be interested, if you would recommend doing such a feature. Also thought about how to use this with different kind of quotations – German, French and so on.

35
351360×191 10.8 KB

Thank you!

2

This should not be done in the font. It is the job of the layout engine.

1 Like
3

That was fast. Thanks for your reply on this @mekkablue. So When it comes to a website/app. This should not be done by the font as well?

Thought about, could be a cool feature with no extra code provided by the layout engine.

4

No, this should be done in the text. There are CMS that automatically take care of it. If you put this in your font, it will not be compatible with a range of languages anymore, and with situations where you specifically want the dumb quotes. A font cannot decide that, a layout engine can take a guess.

5

Valid points. Thanks to you!