SOLVED Add unicode codepoint to newly added glyph.ss01 …



  • Dear Robofont users,

    I’m currently working on the first font in Robofont … I created some new glyphs, A–Z and 0–9 for stylistic sets 01, 02, and 03 …

    I’d like to ask, how can I assign those glyphs a unicode codepoint?

    And would e.g. A.ss01 get the same unicode codepoint as A? (I think so, but I’m not completely sure …)

    Thank you so much!



  • 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.


  • admin

    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 would recommend you to write an OpenType feature to switch the A to the alternate A.ss01 in InDesign:

    feature ss01 {
        sub A by A.ss01;
        # ...
    } ss01;