TL/DR: Please +1 my feature request #0015490.
---------------- And here the full Martin-version. Courage... Dear list, three weeks ago, during my holiday, I had written about activating the OpenType feature "randomize" and had no solution from this list. When I researched some more I found that "rand" is truly an exotic feature. Then I found that "Contextual Alternates" have already become mainstream, over 3000 fonts offer those extra goodness glyphs on MyFonts.com alone. If you are not yet familiar, you can read a nice intro here: http://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html >From the heading "Substitute ? depending on the context!" on. I will share a brief quote: "Contextual features have opened up a whole new spectrum of possibilities, enabling you to define very individual rules on how glyph variants are triggered. They have allowed quite complex typographic ideas to be tunred into working fonts." Now, I just submitted a feature request for giving Scribus users access to this OT feature. The number is #0015490 so you can find it here: https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15490 With my last question I did not push too much, as it was exotic. But with this feature I invite all users who care for "advanced typography" to give their input, their +1, their "me too", their critique, so that our muchly busy developers can get a feel for what priority to give this request. InDesign and Illustrator can activate this OT feature. Old MS Word 2010 can activate this! XARA Designer Pro X cannot. The latest Inkscape can do Ligatures but not Contextual Alternates. My old Corel Draw X6 does mention this feature as "not available" between many other features which were already available back then. I have no access to a more recent Corel Draw because I "have gone Scribus" a few years ago. So this seems to be a non-trivial piece of work for the developers. Sadly I do not really program, just mess a little with Python. I found a work-around for Scribus which involves render frames: One needs to create a new Render Frame Configuration and make it use the XeteX engine or XeLateX and then use syntax like "\setmainfont[Contextuals=Alternate]{your-font-name-here}". This works and is a crutch to show more natural handwriting. But anything TeX is a pain and having this feature in "real Scribus text frames" would be awesome. A related problem is this: In other DTP tools, the extra glyphs show up in the glyphs palette as "unmapped glyphs". This would give another workaround which would be "more work" but also easier than learning about XeteX, for example for headings: Insert > Glyph > open the palette > double-click the alternate character and be happy. Sadly in Scribus I cannot get the unmapped glyphs to even show up. I know they are there in my fonts. Other tools like "Fontmatrix" do show them. Please let me know what you think. And as always: The fact that I propose one more feature does not mean that I do not like Scribus. I rather love Scribus as lot, that is why I bother to make it keep developing. Thank you for your consideration and greetings, Martin -- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11 tel pers 97.44.62.95
