Variation selectors

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William
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Variation selectors

Post by William »

How does one make a font that can apply variation selector sequences please?

This question has arisen as a result of thinking about a particular encoding problem.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0021.html

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0027.html

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0028.html

Here is a link to the index in case there are further posts in the thread.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... index.html

My suggestion for the encoding of the items would not use variation selectors, yet looking at the third post listed above I am wondering just how the task could be done if variation selectors were used.

William Overington

18 March 2015
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Variation selectors

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Unicode variation sequences are currently not supported by FontCreator. This is the first time someone even asked about this, so my guess is most people don't even know what this is. But more important, most people don't even need them, so adding this to FontCreator has a very low priority.
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William
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Re: Variation selectors

Post by William »

Thank you for replying.

> But more important, most people don't even need them, so adding this to FontCreator has a very low priority.

Is it that something would need to be added to FontCreator to provide the facility; or would it be done by a font designer using FontCreator in its existing form, by including within the font some sort of OpenType table, like using a glyph substitution in an rlig table or maybe a liga table?

William
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Re: Variation selectors

Post by Erwin Denissen »

William wrote:Is it that something would need to be added to FontCreator to provide the facility
Yes, we would need to develop this.
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Re: Variation selectors

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Maybe I misunderstood your original question, and was mixing Character Variants with Unicode Variation Sequences.

Unicode Variation Sequences are currently not supported, and are fairly new.

Character Variants are OpenType Layout Features, which FontCreator fully supports. I hope to release a minor update of version 9 later today which allows you to included additional information (cvXX feature params) related to such character variants:
CharacterVariantAlternates.png
CharacterVariantAlternates.png (22.4 KiB) Viewed 11373 times
CharacterVariantParams.png
CharacterVariantParams.png (15.78 KiB) Viewed 11373 times
Erwin Denissen
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