Hello not sure what makes more sense in this case.
I am only going for one set of alternate shapes but I don’t know if I should use .swsh or the positional form nomenclature
I may be wrong, but I think .init/.medi/.fina are conventionally intended for non-Latin orthography that requires special joining, such as Arabic. Latin swashes would more likely be looked for under .swsh.
Given that .init and .fina were also recommended for beginning-stroke and ending-stroke glyphs in a connecting script, .init and .fina should be fine for beginning and ending swashes.
That makes sense, but if I use .swash for all the alternate glyphs how do I prevent having a final form in the middle of a word as in the ‘a’ in this exemple
Personally I would not use such a glyph in the middle of a word. It is not good typography. If one must use it, then substitution feature code could be written.
Hi George, that’s my point, I want to avoid this but using .swash on all glyphs creates this problem
I don’t know how to prevent it
You can have substitution feature code to avoid it. Write it so that if any glyph (except punctuation) follows a swash, then sub a regular glyph in.
The Positional Alternates tutorial should help guide you through that issue. (But I now note that it suggests .init etc. suffixes, so maybe my advice above was off.)
ETA: the tutorial, and the script mentioned in it, suggest calt as the feature in which to put the substitution code, but if these are only to be triggered discretionarily I would think you’d want it in swsh and/or a stylistic set instead.
I agree on using the positional forms over using .swsh.
thanks a lot for the help 