How do you test your locl features?

Brandon Buerkle
Brandon Buerkle Posts: 4
in Font Technology
I feel like a total noob asking this (because I am), but after googling in vain I thought this would be the best place to ask.

I’m making my first font. It’s perhaps a bit beyond my reach, but that’s how we learn, right? I’m trying to include some standard locl language features for Catalan, Dutch, German, Romanian, and Turkish (and languages which share the same features). It seems pretty straightforward, and there are lots of good tutorials out there (Tal Leming’s OpenType Cookbook, the Glyphs tutorials, etc.). However, nowhere does it mention how to test any of these features.

I’ve tried opening Pages (mac os 10.14 Mojave) and changing the language and region, as well as changing my keyboard to the specified language. I’ve also tried changing the dictionary in Adobe InDesign CC 2019 to test there. I’m guessing this is all that’s needed. However, my features don’t seem to work (or work the way I expect). I don’t know if this is because my approach to testing is incorrect, or because my features are written incorrectly.

What do you all do to test out locl OpenType features?
(If I know I’m testing correctly, then I can know if my features simply don’t work.)

Thanks!
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Comments

  • Johannes Neumeier
    Johannes Neumeier Posts: 380


    In InDesign either of those two is what you want to change to the language you are testing, then type the glyphs or combinations you are expecting to be substituted and see if they do.

    In web pages setting the 
    lang="en-GB"
    attribute of any (parent) tag containing the test string will activate the locl with CSS 
    font-feature-settings: "locl";

    Maybe also your font editor has options to test, GlyphApps for example does.

  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 364
    It should definitely work in InDesign. If not, there’s probably some error in your feature code.
  • Brandon Buerkle
    Brandon Buerkle Posts: 4
    Johannes, thank you so much! (And, hooray! my locl features work!) I feel really embarrassed that I didn’t see that before (or bother to google it). Oh, tunnel vision.

    And Jens, that’s what I figured. I mean... it’s InDesign. Thankfully it does work in InDesign (now that I know what to do), and I don’t have any feature code errors. Whew!

    Now on to kerning! 😬
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    Sorry I didn’t explain that clearly enough the first time, Brandon!
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 302
    You can design and test locl and other OpenType features within FontCreator and it also has a webfont test feature which allows you to view your font within a web page. You can see a sample web page with a Dutch locl feature here:


  • Stefan Peev
    Stefan Peev Posts: 103
    I would like to suggest testing of the Local Features through LibreOffice too. Here is an example...


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,227
    Slightly tangential to the original topic...

    Has anyone succeeded in adding a Hunspell dictionary language to InDesign and having it pick up and apply 'locl' substitutions? I tried this for Serbian, went through the steps to download and add the Serbian dictionary and got Serbian to appear as a language in InDesign, but 'locl' substitutions failed.
  • Stefan Peev
    Stefan Peev Posts: 103
    John Hudson said:
    Slightly tangential to the original topic...

    Has anyone succeeded in adding a Hunspell dictionary language to InDesign and having it pick up and apply 'locl' substitutions? I tried this for Serbian, went through the steps to download and add the Serbian dictionary and got Serbian to appear as a language in InDesign, but 'locl' substitutions failed.
    I used another tricky way – Miguel Sousa's Method One: Custom INX file. I opened Sousa's INX file, made a text frame with Serbian Cyrillic text, copied and pasted this text frame in another Indesign file. The result is as follow:



    This makes sense only if you want to preview Serbian glyphs in Indesign. It is not for writting long Serbian texts and make a layout.

    Some Sources:

    Miguel Sousa: How to enable more languages in InDesign CS5.5
    Adobe Forum: Add or remove Hunspell dictionaries | CC, CS6
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 944
    I’ve never tried adding the sr_RS Hunspell dictionary. (I use the .inx trick to add Serbian localization to testing docs on an ad-hoc basis.)

    Do you suppose that you need to do something to let InDesign know to map the sr ISO 639-1 lang code to the SRB OpenType lang tag? I mean, you’d think there’d be a full dictionary of these cross references already built-in; but, on the other hand, Serbian support isn’t provided out of the box, so . . .

    Not sure where you’d add this. There doesn’t seem to be a relevant element in the HunspellPlugin info.plist. :-/

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