I’m attempting to create a font of my own handwriting. This of course means that I’m attempting to make my font as close to my actual handwriting as possible.
However:
font2.png
(Ignore the words; they’re not supposed to make sense)
Pairs of letters look too identical; I found a typewriter font (I think it was of a typewriter, anyway) a long while back that had sort of ‘randomized’ characters when you typed multiples of the same letter, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to make a font with this sort of feature in FontCreator.
Basically, I’m wanting to know if there’s a way to make a font where typing ‘aa’ would automatically change the second ‘a’ to a different-looking ‘a’, withOUT having to replace one of the accented ‘a’ characters and using one of them to simulate extra versions of letters:
examplew.png
Any help would be appreciated! 
You could make a font family and change from normal to “italic,” then “bold” as you type along.
Its not impossible, but there are not many applications that support OpenType glyph substitution. Word 2010 will and InDesign or Quark Express. I think PhotoShop does too.
It is possible to set up automatic glyph substitutions so that if you type ae what you get is æ — the same principle can be used to get glyph variants of a, depending on which letter follows it. It is also possible to use the Randomize OpenType tag, though I have never done it. Prepare yourself for some serious study.
FontCreator doesn’t yet offer any way to add OpenType features, primarily because of the dearth of application support, but it is not particularly hard to do with free 3rd party programs like VOLT or OpenType Compiler.
Adding OpenType Features
The document to which Bhikkhu Pesala kindly provides a link includes the following.
UI suggestion: This feature should be enabled/disabled via a preference setting; “enabled” is the recommended default.
It seems to me by inference from another part of the rand section that the user interface can decide the way that the random numbers are produced.
From my experience with using random numbers in other situations, nothing to do with typography, there are two major ways to use random numbers. It seems possible that the two ways could be applied in the design of a user interface in this situation.
In the one method, the random numbers are a different sequence every time. So, displaying a particular document on one occasion would produce a display and displaying the same document on the next occasion would produce a different display, and so on.
In the other method, the random numbers are the same sequence every time that a seed value has a particular value. So, displaying a particular document on one occasion would produce a display and displaying the same document on the next occasion would produce the same display, and so on. However, if the seed value were changed then displaying a particular document on one occasion would still produce a display and displaying the same document on the next occasion would still produce the same display, and so on, yet the particular display would be different from what was produced using a different seed value.
So, it seems to me that if one is designing the user interface for the application program it would be a good idea to have a default value for the seed value, yet allow the user to change the seed value if he or she so chooses. This would then mean that a user could experiment with different seed values until a display that he or she liked, or indeed that he or she found suitable, were found. Whether a rich text format could then carry the seed value in the document is an interesting question. The reason that I used the phrase “or indeed that he or she found suitable” could be because, for example, suppose that there are several alternate versions of a lowercase g and that one of them has a long loop under it, it might be that that particular glyph would not look right in a word such as page as the loop of the g might clash with the descender of the p.
William Overington
9 February 2010