[CREATE] Colorfont Workshop results

[Ricardo Lafuente]

On 06/29/2012 01:39 PM, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> Since sometimes it seems you may have recognizable/semi-recognizable
> glyphs in the overlay, I wonder if it would be possible to have an
> alternative message in the overlays, different from the basic text.
> Another way of saying this might be whether the overlay glyph might be
> different each time a base glyph occurs...

This is a wonderful idea, but at the moment rather hard to implement on 
a F/LOSS stack.

For that kind of functionality, one would need to make use of OpenType 
features, namely the Contextual Alternates feature (IIRC).

FontForge allows designers to set these features within their typefaces 
-- BTW, with an interface that's miles ahead from the main proprietary 
alternative, FontLab Studio -- so making a font that can accomplish what 
you mention is possible.

However, the problem lies on the lack of support for these features on 
layout and graphical tools in general. We had looked into this before, 
and it appears that neither Scribus, Inkscape or Gimp provide a way to 
work with non-basic OpenType features such as contextual alternates.

Browsers, I've read recently, look like they're on the way to enable use 
of these features, but it's not yet there it seems.

It's also worth noting that support for most OpenType features in Adobe 
software is functional, but rather flaky and clumsy to use, hidden 
behind layers of opaque submenus.

This is a feature we'd love to be able to use in F/LOSS tools, but it 
looks like a considerable technical challenge and, from what I've 
gathered from existing bug reports/feature requests, sadly not a high 
priority.

:r