Whilst studying many fonts with Cyrillic support it became apparent that many fonts do Localisation for Bulgarian Cyrillic and Macedonian/Serbian Cyrillic by using Stylistic Alternates insead of or as well as Open Type Localisation.
The reason which was stated was that Localisation doesn't work in many circumstances and with a lot of software.
I must admit that when I have produced a font I only test the Localisation features very superficially because it is difficult to test.
Does anyone have any experience or information about the Open Type Localisation not working.
What is the best way to do Localisation ?
What is the best way to test Localisation ?
Any opinion, advice or information would be welcome.
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For example, in InDesign there is no default language option for Serbian (or Macedonian). You can only add it by jumping through a number of hoops:
https://blog.typekit.com/2011/11/04/how-to-enable-more-languages-in-indesign-cs5-5/
I use the hackish Method 1 and keep an .inx file that contains a text block with Serbian language applied, and copying that into another document adds the option. So, that’s what I do to prep a document for testing Serbian/Macedonian localization.
Of course, Serbian is complicated by the fact that Serbia is one of the few (only?) countries that considers both Latin and Cyrillic orthography to be equally official, so you have to be sure you’re adding Serbian Cyrillic.
You could test the Cyrillic local features here – http://www.cyreal.org/Font-Testing-Page/index-cyrillic.php
If I know that I need to provide language-specific forms in environments that might not support <locl> or in which I can't rely on documents having accurate language tagging, I make separate fonts. That's really the only robust way in such situations.
Here was me naïvely thinking that this was a function of the operating system and so it would just work based on the location set in the operating system, it seems it is a function of the individual applications.
From now on I will put Localisation in as Stylistic Alternates as well as Open Type Localisation. After all the look up tables already exist so it wouldn't enlarge the font file by very much to use the same lookups in two features rather than just one. And at some point in the future there will be applications which actually be able to use this feature.
Well, that is the other possible decision.