Re: Latin font support in Windows (was Re: First post: presenting Classical Alyis)

Herman Miller wrote:
>(If I can figure out how they work, I'd like to
> add some of these features to Thryomanes 1.4. But Thryomanes 1.3 only
> has a few ligature tables for phonetic symbols, and earlier versions
> didn't have any special OpenType features at all.)
I don't know what you use to create Thyromanes, but in FontForge, you
simply insert an anchor into the base glyph, and an anchor with the same
name in the diacritic. Decent font engines then simply make the two
anchors overlap. Usually, you'd use the same anchor for all diacritics
that go above a letter. Seeing as I can't provide detailed instructions
for how to do it in FontForge, I imagine this quick post is going to be
applicable to anything you care to name, too :)

You can also create base-diacritic ligature combinations (i.e. custom
precomposed letters, without an associated Unicode character) in the
usual way if you want something peculiar, e.g. German style ÄÖÜ where
the diaereses are positioned within the letter. But in general, you
wouldn't do this.

(OTOH, the only font engine I've used with support for such advanced
features, ICU as used in XeTeX (providing OpenType fonts in TeX),
automatically places the diacritic above the letter anyway (i.e. higher
above a h/T then t then s, when there's no anchor). I imagine this
method is necessary with multiple diacritics, so if your font engine
doesn't do it, I'd consider it buggy.)

--
Tristan.

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