A string of marks

Justin Williams

Hi, I'm new to this forum! I hope this is the right category for this question. I'm using the Glyphs app and am making a couple of fonts, nearly finished but a few complications to overcome. Help much appreciated!

I have the basics of making marks. Still struggling with making nonspacing marks that are ligatures, getting them to use markers... But in the meantime… is there a way we can write a series of markers? For example, making a set of small letters, say a whole alphabet, and then being able to trigger them to write above the normal text?

For example, if I write:

Today is Monday

And I want to insert a marker after ‘M’ and write ‘elephant’ so that the word ‘elephant’ appears in small writing above Monday… I’d type… not sure how to do it but basically in my mind it is:

Today is M(start ‘mark’ text)elephant(end 'mark text)onday

I don’t know if this is best done using the principle of nonspacing markers, or some other method. I also don’t know if there is a way we can assign a keystroke or series of keystrokes to start and end the marker stuff. I would love to learn how we can do this task.

Thanks!

John Hudson

This can be done using OpenType layout features, with a combination of GSUB and GPOS, but it's difficult and not typical. In general, in situations where one has a string of text applied as a notation to another string of text, this is handled at a higher level than the font (although may make use of font features in the process). Correct identification of the strings requires markup, and correct alignment goes beyond what is easily possible in OpenType. An example would be ruby notation of Japanese or Korean (in this example, the small ruby string is to the side of the vertical text, but the same principle applies for horizontal layout):

John Hudson

The closest I've come to doing this in a real world situation using just OpenType Layout is sequences of two superscript numerals or letters used as melodic notation in the Samaveda.