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

T. A. McLeay wrote:
> 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 :)
I can add anchors in VOLT, but I've run into problems trying to get
mark-mark positioning to work (diacritics on top of other diacritics, on
top of a base character). VOLT can only create OpenType tables, not read
them from existing fonts, so I can't look at any working examples for
reference. The OpenType documentation is pretty vague on all these
things, since the actual rendering largely depends on what Uniscribe
does with it, which I can't find documented. So it's mainly a lot of
trial and error. Not to mention that different versions of Uniscribe
will do different things, and the only way to get Uniscribe is by
installing certain products from Microsoft.

One alternative is Graphite (from SIL), but only a small handful of
programs can do anything at all with Graphite fonts.