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Implementation of glyphs alternate variants

Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 9:53 am
by jch02140
I am not sure if this has been discuss before but I am curious what is the best way to implement characters variants...

For example, if there is only a single variant for certain characters such as this example here:
test.png
test.png (103.8 KiB) Viewed 9405 times
I guess the "salt" feature would be sufficient?

What happened if there are multiple variants for certain characters? Do I use the "aalt" and/or "ssXX" for the different variants?
Especially given some limitations of some softwares (*cough* Adobe *cough*)...

Re: Implementation of glyphs alternate variants

Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 2:15 pm
by MikeW
I usually use a few different strategies. For the instance(s) you give, I would likely use salt, SSs for varients (so more than one SS for the alternates to pick them all up), aalt, etc. I usually skip the CVs as there is spotty support. And depending upon who you will be selling through, I'll assign them to the PUA area so they can be found in glyph panels. Creative Market, for example, wants the extra glyphs to be PUA encoded.

Few applications support all those feature areas, so it often takes a shotgun approach to enable "native" support for a wide range of applications. And most/many don't support certain features at all. For instance, Adobe products don't support the hist feature at all, so I also replicate the features I use in it to a stylistic set. Dumb, but that's the way it is.

Re: Implementation of glyphs alternate variants

Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 1:01 pm
by jch02140
Thanks for your input, Mike...

So what you mean is implementing multiple ways (ie. salt + aalt + PUA) for maximum support?

Re: Implementation of glyphs alternate variants

Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 1:33 pm
by MikeW
Yep. That's what I mean.

It's kind of a pita in one sense, but the seemingly duplication of effort is swift and really doesn't add to the file size appreciably (like only a few KBs).

Mike