Hi, I followed your excellent tutorial on creating stacking marks for Thai https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/mark-to-mark-positioning
The marks stack great in Indesign CS5, but Illustrator CS5 and CC 2015.3 still has them appearing layered on top of each other. Is there a way to make Illustrator recognize the mkmk feature?
thanks,
John
Sorry I canāt offer more help, but have you confirmed Illustrator can handle Thai normally, by testing other Thai fonts? If it can display those correctly we should be able to come up with some possible things to try in your font.
Thanks for the reply! Hereās my opentype coding, adapted from yours:
markClass [uni0E31 uni0E32 uni0E33 uni0E34 uni0E35 uni0E36 uni0E37 uni0E47 uni0E48 uni0E49 uni0E4A uni0E4B uni0E4C uni0E4D uni0E4E] <anchor 0 500> @MARK_TOP_CENTER;
feature mkmk {
Mark to Mark positioning
lookup STACK_ON_TOP {
lookupflag MarkAttachmentType @MARK_TOP_CENTER;
pos mark [uni0E31 uni0E32 uni0E33 uni0E34 uni0E35 uni0E36 uni0E37 uni0E47 uni0E48 uni0E49 uni0E4A uni0E4B uni0E4C uni0E4D uni0E4E] <anchor 0 750> mark @MARK_TOP_CENTER;
} STACK_ON_TOP;
} mkmk;
Hereās a snapshot of my font (Wildwords) in Indesign CS5, with a system font for comparison.
And here it is in Illustrator CC2015. Now the accent marks are on top of each other instead of stacking, so it tells me Illustrator is not recognizing mkmk and/or positioning.
But strangely, the system font works fine in both. Itās a TTF, which I opened in Glyphs to check the scripting, and thereās no opentype ligatures relating to Thai marks. Theyāre doing it some other way. If you have Ayuthaha, Krungthem, Sathu or Silom, maybe you could open them up and see.
In the meantime, I did come up with a workaround, which was to create a ligature for every mark combination. But for the future, that is more work, and not as elegant. 
Plus it would be cool to be able to use mkmk positioning for all kinds of things in Illustrator, if it would just recognize it!
thanks,
John
I have only CS4 so unfortunately, so I canāt test compatibility with CC. Iāve never really got anywhere with Illustrator.
In your screenshots, none of the apps is displaying Ayutthaya in a standard way. I donāt know if thatās a font problem or a shaping problem, but the tone marks are always the āupstairsā version, which leaves far too much gap above a consonant when thereās no vowel mark in there. (Judging by whatās happening in the final screenshot, it looks like the ādownstairsā versions of tone marks are being replaced by .notdef, which implies the font lacks glyphs for them. But it could equally be a serious problem with the text engine.)
In your font in InDesign CS5, something weird has happened with sara-aa (ąø²): following a tone mark itās getting raised off the baseline. Iāve seen this behaviour before somewhere, but canāt remember what caused it. Somethingās not right in the GDEF or GPOS. (Side note: move the anchor on ąø so the right side of ąøµ aligns with its stem. Or if that anchor is already there, then it looks as if the marks are not using the right anchors.)
I would not expect the Middle Eastern version to work, and I didnāt actually know there was a South Asian version as well. In InDesign CS4 I use the standard version but need the WRC to be enabled (any of the left-to-right settings works fine for me). I donāt know if WRC also applies to Illustrator.
@GeorgSeifert @mekkablue Do you happen to know if Illustrator should work the same way with WRC as InDesign? Any other ideas for things to try?
I donāt know anyone from the Illustrator team I am afraid. Is there someone from Adobe support that can help out? I could ask Dan here at ATypI, and he may be able to point me to someone.
I contacted everyone I know at Adobe, and one person just replied that he found out InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop do not yet support Thai. Heās forwarded my email to the Illustrator team in hopes that it moves mkmk support up the priority list. So I suppose the more pressure the better!
Iām still at a loss as to how the system TTFs accomplish it, though.
john
The system TTFs donāt have any GPOS. In the text you show itās all just default position. No GSUB, no GPOS. The outlines are already at that position.
Whoa, you are right! Both Adobe programs do have the single marks āfloatingā above the letters, rather than shifting down.
But the accents DO shift down in Textedit, so there is some kind of repositioning code in it.
I donāt believe the characters are composites. In the document Iām getting from my client, theyāre made up of three separate characters ā the base letter, then one or two accents with character widths of zero, positioned to the left of the sidebearing and up high. Hereās a double-accent character pasted into the Glyphs text window:
and here it is with spaces added between the characters:
Itās three separate pieces. Weird that they get them to shift in a truetype font.
Still, I guess composite ligatures is my answer, for now at least. And Bendy, thanks for the catch on the shifting sara-aa.
John
Apple System fonts use AAT tables instead of GSUB for layout and positioning. Thatās why it works in TextEdit. I have a look at this.
Hello @jroshell,
I maybe misunderstanding the issue youāre facing, but in my opinion, if the font is shaping correctly in InDesign and not in Illustrator, you need to activate the Adobe World Ready Composer (WRC). Now you cannot switch on the WRC from the paragraph toolbar option like you can in CS6+ so youāll have to try the following:
If this solution works for you, you can simply copy/paste this text box to your document and duplicate it as many times as you need.
Additionally, in Illustrator CC, you can try switching on the WRC from the Paragraph toolbar, and activating āThaiā language preset in the Character toolbar. This enables hyphenation dictionaries and activates the OpenType locale settings.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Kalapi
Thanks - this is still an issue with the latest version of CC 25.1 so no fix after 5 years? Anyway @kalapi thanks your workaround advice saved me when I was dong some Thai product art. Much appreciated.
