Stylistic Alternates

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Support
1

Hello,

I’m currently testing my font in Adobe Illustrator and a lot of my Stylistic Alternate characters will not show up.

For example, I have a regular letter y, and then two alternate characters, but only one will show up in Adobe Illustrator. The alternate characters are named y.ss03 and y.ss04 (I don’t have y.ss01 and y.ss02 because I wanted to keep the alternate letter swashes all in the same stylistic set for file cleanliness, so I went straight to y.ss03). I was recommended to create swashed characters as alternates so they’re easier to switch in and out vs just being a random character with a unicode. So, when I test a letter y in Illustrator, I can see the regular y and y.ss03.

Same thing happens with the letter t. I have a letter t and four alternates, but not all of these show up. I have named my alternate characters for t as t.ss01 t.ss02 t.ss03 t.ss04 and t.ss05, and in the OpenType Designer I have inserted all under Stylistic Alternates1 (salt) - Single Substitution1. I also have a t.init under AccessAllAlternates1 (aalt) - Single Substitution2 and applied chaining context under Contextual Alternates. When I test the font in Illustrator, I can see the regular t and I can choose t.init and t.ss01 but all the other alternates are missing.

I noticed that the characters that will show up are either the .init characters and the ones that appear first in the .ss group. But as you can see from my screenshots, they line up in an irregular order.

I hope someone can advice me if I have inserted the alternates under the wrong category or what exactly is the problem. I have been stuck with this for several days.

Thank you!

01.PNG
02.png
03.PNG
04.PNG
05.png

2

You use the wrong substitution lookup, as you need an Alternate lookup. Right now you have a single substitution lookup.

Let us know your results.

3

I now tried to make it like this:

Under Default I added New Item - Known feature - Stylistic Alternates (salt). Under Stylistic Alternates (salt) I added a New Item - Alternate substitution. Then added a New Substitution such as y and y.ss03. It doesn’t allow me to add another substitution like y and y.ss04 in the same alternate lookup. I then made another lookup Alternate2 and added y and y.ss04 as a substitution there.

When I now test the font in Illustrator again, it still only shows me a regular y and y.ss03. But y.ss04 is still not showing.

I tried to find the answer by reading the FC manual but I’m having trouble understanding it all. Where do I need to insert the stylistic alternates for them to work correctly?

4

It’s working!

I previously didn’t understand why I couldn’t add multiple alternates in the same lookup (because I tried to make them separately). I now created an Alternate lookup and simply added all the alternate character names to the Output line, i.e.
Input: q
Output: q.ss01 q.ss02 q.ss03 q.ss04

All these characters now show up in Illustrator.

Thank you!