On Friday, June 29, 2012, 4:39:18 PM, Ricardo wrote: RL> For that kind of functionality, one would need to make use of OpenType RL> features, namely the Contextual Alternates feature (IIRC).
RL> FontForge allows designers to set these features within their typefaces RL> -- BTW, with an interface that's miles ahead from the main proprietary RL> alternative, FontLab Studio -- so making a font that can accomplish what RL> you mention is possible. RL> However, the problem lies on the lack of support for these features on RL> layout and graphical tools in general. We had looked into this before, RL> and it appears that neither Scribus, Inkscape or Gimp provide a way to RL> work with non-basic OpenType features such as contextual alternates. CSS3 Fonts adds suport for OpenType alternate forms. See http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-fonts/#font-variant-alternates-prop RL> Browsers, I've read recently, look like they're on the way to enable use RL> of these features, but it's not yet there it seems. Firefox has supported this for a while 9 a couple of years) http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/ Adobe is behind the idea as well http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2010/09/opentype-features-come-to-the-web.html (I understand they may be working on extending WebKit to support this) and now IE10 has added support as well http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/01/09/css-corner-using-the-whole-font.aspx RL> It's also worth noting that support for most OpenType features in Adobe RL> software is functional, but rather flaky and clumsy to use, hidden RL> behind layers of opaque submenus. Unfortunately. RL> This is a feature we'd love to be able to use in F/LOSS tools, but it RL> looks like a considerable technical challenge and, from what I've RL> gathered from existing bug reports/feature requests, sadly not a high RL> priority. I think things are looking up here. It was a bit of a chicken and egg situation - not many fonts had these features, and web pages mostly depended on platform fonts (which didn't have these features) because downloadable fonts did not work. Downloadable fonts are now common, so web pages can depend on these features because the designer knows which font will be used. So there is more interest in making the opentype features available to stylistic control. -- Chris Lilley Technical Director, Interaction Domain W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
