Small Cap Ligatures overide

Jani Paavola
Jani Paavola Posts: 46
edited November 2015 in Type Design Software
Help! I'm developing a font in Fontlab Studio, and now run into ligatures and small caps related OpenType-coding problem.
Testing my font, the ligatures override the small caps. In a text set in small caps the ligatures won't change to small caps.
I'm pretty sure I've done this before, but now I cannot make it work.
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Comments

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,734
    One way to fix this is to move your ligature feature so it's after the small caps feature. Features are executed in the order you place them in the font.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,190
    Features are executed in the order you place them in the font.
    Technically, lookups are executed in the order you place them in the font, but for typical Latin fonts feature ordering and lookup ordering tend to be the same.
  • Jani Paavola
    Jani Paavola Posts: 46
    Thank you! I tried this but I guess cpu font cache fooled me. Forgot to test in Fontlab preview...
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,734
    The font cache was not created with font development in mind. You can get around it by changing the name of your font with each version you generate and want to test. I usually append a letter to the name of the font, but numbers will also work. A nice thing about this approach is that you can compare different versions side by side in apps. When everything is working and you're ready to generate your final fonts, delete the extra character(s) from the name.
  • Jani Paavola
    Jani Paavola Posts: 46
    Mark, the name changing is an excellent idea! Will do that from now on. Until now I've cleared the cache using Ccleaner, the tip I got from someone at Typophile a while back. The problem is, that it fails every now and then. Why, no idea.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh
    Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh Posts: 539
    I use the same version control / naming control as Mark and use a robofont script to handle it. https://gist.github.com/okay-type/39594d9533ecb62beaf2
  • Michael Jarboe
    Michael Jarboe Posts: 265
    Font Nuke used to be crucial to my process, but required a restart everytime it's used. Somehow I found a process using a 3rd party font management app where I could simply overwrite a previous font version then deactivate/activate said font and it would properly update without any cache problems.

    Why not just use RoboFont Test Install? I've found once a new version is installed over the previous, any live documents will update with the new version immediately.
  • Nina Stössinger
    Nina Stössinger Posts: 151
    Agree, RoboFont Test Install is great in this context. Personally I’ve not had any font-cache issues since.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,887
    As does Suitcase Fusion.

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