Why does my curs feature work in Glyphs and FontGoggles but not in Adobe InDesign?

Hi,

I’m designing a typeface with cursive attachment (curs feature) to connect letters using entry and exit anchors. The feature works perfectly in FontGoggles, the connections between glyphs appear exactly as intended.

However, when I open the font in any Adobe application (InDesign, Illustrator), the curs feature seems to be completely ignored. The letters appear disconnected, as if the anchors don’t exist.

Here’s my setup:

  • Multi-master font with 2 masters (Regular, Script)
  • entry and exit anchors placed on letters and ligatures in the Script master
  • curs feature manually written and injected into the OTF via fontTools (since Glyphs wasn’t compiling it automatically)
  • The feature is confirmed present in the compiled OTF via ttx, I can see the CursivePos lookup in the GPOS table
  • liga and dlig features work correctly in InDesign
  • curs works correctly in FontGoggles

My questions:

  1. Is curs simply not supported in Adobe applications? I’ve read conflicting information about this.
  2. If it’s not supported, what is the recommended approach to achieve cursive connections that work in InDesign, should the connection strokes be drawn directly into the ligature glyphs instead? How can I connect two ligatures together ?
  3. Is there any workaround or alternative feature (calt, kern, mark/mkmk) that would achieve a similar visual result in Adobe apps?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Have you tried switching to a different paragraph composer in InDesign?