Dear Frederik,
thank you for your answer!
Why would an alternate version get a unicode value?
It’s not allowed to provide two glyphs with the same unicode value. Thinking from a typesetting point of view: which one should it take?
I see, so … there’s no problem here, but it’s actually right that the alternates named e.g. A.alt or A.ss01 don’t have the same unicode value as A itself … thank you for clarifying this.
I would recommend you to write an OpenType feature to switch the A to the alternate A.ss01 in InDesign:
I see! So it seems I’ll try to read the Robofont page on features and the documentation from Adobe and then I can hopefully figure out what to write in that feature file as now it’s completely empty.
I mean, maybe this feature files needs to have lines like the following:
# Script and language coverage
languagesystem DFLT dflt;
languagesystem latn dflt;
And afterwards I could manually add what you proposed for A–Z and 0–9 in ss01, ss02, and ss03.
feature ss01 {
sub A by A.ss01;
# ...
} ss01;
I saw something like A.alt in some free and open source .ufo files and was wondering what it is, i.e. why would I write .alt instead of some styleset like .ss01 …
EDIT:
I just discovered an article about opentype features on i love typography dot com which lists features like aalt “All alternates“, calt “Contextual alternates“, salt “Stylistic alternates”, et cetera (which I already know from CSS).
So I think for another stylistic version of the figures 0–9, salt would be a kinda semantically correct feature name.