newbie question: how to... vowel diacritics in original fantasy font

[gaiastellar]

hi all,

new here... please forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere... ive looked but i cant find...

im creating a fantasy font from scratch, and i want to use diacritics to represent vowels instead of letters... i intend to map the diacritic characters to the vowel keys, but im unsure how to make them appear above or below the previous character, rather than in there own space like a regular letter...


thanks in advance

paul uk

[ShawnDion]

Hi Paul,
You've picked my curiosity I know there is this as extra info :
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/ ... ks-accents
But I'm guessing you want to be able to type lets say "A" then to overlap said character with the variant of the accent character.
I know by modifying the second vertical line to drop it to 0 it will overlap the previous character to be able to stack them.

I'll do some tests see if I can't find you a trick to do so, maybe someone else has attempted this before and may post a answer before me else wise I'll give you a update on what I've found. I myself I'm trying to figure out on how to use COLR v1 screen mode for glyph I'm going to try stacking which is the same I think as what you are attempting to do with your fantasy font but for you it's less layers to worry about.

I'll take a look this afternoon for me I want to be able to do something like this but with fonts https://github.com/barrabinfc/cat-avatar-generator

Should I find something useful I'll post right away.

Shawn W. Dion

[gaiastellar]

hi shawn,
thanks for your reply...
yes, essentially, the vowel key glyphs with be diacritic marks that need to appear over the previous letter... i have noticed that in some fonts that use diacritic marks, if you position the diacritic mark to the left of the zero line it appears in the previous characters space, and then setting the right hand line to zero means that it doesnt take up any space of its own, so this pretty much achieves what i want. However, following that link you shared to the tutorial on latin diacritic marks, it seems there is a more complicated way to acheive this, where the diacritic marks will interact properly with characters with different heights etc. i think this is called contextual alternatives, although i havent figured out how to use this yet, it seems you can set rules for when different versions of glyphs are used, based on the context... so like in arabic, where there is a standalone, first, middle or last version of all letters...

paul

[PJMiller]

You can correctly position diacritic marks with 'Anchors'.

You have to name the anchor but when you have a base character with a base anchor followed by a mark character with a mark anchor with the corresponding name then the mark character is re-positioned so it's anchor is in the same place as the base anchor of the preceding character.

You also have to insert the corresponding 'MarkPositioning' open type feature into the font for this to work.

Hope this helps.