Using different space glyphs

1

I’m looking at using Contextual Alternates to substitute the space with either a hair, thin or thick space.

Unicode values
Hair = 200A
6 em = 2006
Thin = 2009
Thick = 2004
(as detailed in code page “General Punctuation Range: 2000–206F”

However, I see odd text wrapping occurring. Is there a way to use these different spaces in text layout?

Thanks for for any thoughts
Jeremy

2

You should not substitute glyphs with a different unicode. You can either substitute an alternate space (like “space.thin”) or use contextual GPOS.

3

Thanks Georg,

I had them as space.hair, space.sixth, space.thin, space.thick with no unicodes – so they would just be read as space (u+0020). However, this is when I saw the odd line breaking. I’ve gone back to using no unicodes and will try again.

Could the use of a more narrow value than the set space glyph be interpreted by the text layout engine as a continuous word (so no gap between the word), resulting in not knowing what to do. I don’t have hypenation applied.

I didn’t want to use contextual kerning as the article at Contextual kerning | Glyphs says that the value can’t be interpolated across the fonts. By altering the space value I can benefit from different glyph widths across the font export range.

4

For variable fonts, you can use variable poisoning as written in that tutorial under “Interpolating kerning values”.

And for static fonts, you can use tokens to master numbers. Tokens — Glyphs Handbook

5

Gosh, that sounds frightening!

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