Bhikkhu Pesala wrote: ↑Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:09 am
This stuff is like programming, and FontCreator is a software that allows users to do OpenType programming. The help documentation should tell us how to use the program, not how to do programming.
But that's the problem -- the help documentation
doesn't tell us how to use the program. There isn't even basic definition for things -- like, when I'm in that Chaining Context dialog box, if I click on the "Help" button that you see in there, then one might expect to just get at least a simple definition of what you're seeing on that page -- Backtrack, Input, Lookahead, etc. -- but there's nothing, not even a definition of what those terms mean, let alone any help in how to use make use of that feature.
There are many possible ways to program OpenType features. There is a description of features such as
Contextual Ligatures on the Microsoft website.
Very little info there.
FontCreator is pretty smart. It will add a number of standard features automatically, and automatically generate kerning pair classes. However, I prefer to create my own kerning pair classes. It is more work, and I may make mistakes that I need to debug, but it gives me more control.
Yes, I learned that much fairly quickly, too, that it's much better to do your own classes/kerning, rather than autokerning. It's a nice feature to have, though, if for some reason you just wanted to whiz off a font super-fast or something, and didn't care much about how "perfect" the kerning was.
I learnt some stuff by opening professional fonts and looking at the code, and other stuff by trial and error, or by reading the forum and asking questions. I learnt some things from the
TypeDrawers Forum, where there are several professional type designers who use other software like Fontographer.
I started on Fog (as it was affectionately called back when it was "the" font software to get -- before FC)
and all the hair-pulling I went through with learning that gave me a good head start when I first got FC, as there's much that was quite similar.
I've learned SO much since then, though -- learning how to do ligatures (so simple now!) and now these contextual alts is way ahead of where I was back with Fog, but I learned it all basically via this forum, by asking "How do you do this?" and not via the help files.
Also, from Erwin...
Well, that page is interesting (for me, since I'm trying to learn about this stuff), but at the same time a bit confusing, or not quite clear.
Like, the first paragraph there says: "There are two Chained Context lookups, one for positioning and the other for substitutions. They will perform the substitution tables if a match is found for the combination of backtrack, input, and lookahead."
Even as I'm trying to learn this, and don't quite have a grasp of this yet, I know that's not entirely accurate -- because the substitution that I did already, for those "ender" glyphs, didn't make use of "the combination of backtrack, input, and lookahead," but only input and lookahead.
In any case, I suppose if I just give up (for the time being) on the idea of actually "understanding" what I'm doing, and what the definition of each and every word might mean, what I really want to know is simply
how to do what I want to do.
And so back to my question-of-the-day (or yesterday), I've now got "ender" glyphs showing up nicely, and know how to add in more -- but I can't figure out how to go about adding in a second, separate thing to do my "beginner" letters ((or "starter" letters -- is there another word for the first letter of a word???). I tried various things last night, like just adding in a second Chaining Context, but when I do that it seems I can't add in my @LATIN class (with all my latin characters) because, I'm assuming, I used it already in the other Chaining Context.
Or I don't know what the heck is happening, because I have no idea what I'm doing.
So I guess that's basically my question. I've done my "enders," those are all going fine, but how do I add in an additional one for my "beginners" (or whatever)?
