I will be speaking at TypeCon: “Adventures in Contextuality”.
This started out as
an article for I Love Typography.
I’ll be covering the history of <calt> and including typefaces that make interesting use of the feature, both by myself and others.
If you are aware of any suitable candidate typefaces, please let me know.
Thanks,
Nick
Comments
Thanks.
Please note that simulating hand scripts, the original purpose of <calt>, is not its only use, and other effects, such as pseudo-randomness, will also be addressed.
Erik van Blokland helped me with the code. It has up to four or five alternates per glyph. We added pseudo-randomness on the width and vertical and horizontal position.
Someone wanted it's calligraphy as a typeface to produce a book. We tried to mimic the writers' irregularity.
It’s perhaps a bit on the periphery of the subject, but for my digitized calligraphic lettering of Queen Beatrix’s Adication Act (2013), the former queen (‘koningin’) and new king (‘koning’) had their own version of the g, and ‘koninklijk’ (= royal) a special k at the end. I made the fonts especially for the abdication text and they were only used once.
A few more images can be found in this presentation.
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/9223/#Comment_9223
1) Are you aware of the {calt} wizardry that Tal Leming built into Christian Schwartz & Dino Sanchez’s Luxury Text Italic to manage swash all-caps settings?
2) I employed a fair number of {calt} rules in Big Caslon Italic for FB in order to manage a lot of swash combinations, including secondary proximities:
Also, are you making a distinction between the {calt} feature itself and contextual lookups in general (regardless of the feature to which they’re assigned)?
I will be focusing on ways in which the <calt> feature has prompted new kinds of typeface design—as the aspect of OpenType which goes beyond repeating existing concepts such as small caps, oldstyle figures, and traditional ligatures.
So, if contextual lookups in, say, the <liga> feature, result in new forms and effects, I will address that.
It can, insofar as it's flexibility extends typeform ligation to a greater range of letters and diacritics than would be typical in a ligature glyph mapping approach. See page 28 of my Brill presentation deck from Typo Berlin last year.
Nothing new under the sun here, except that it was probably the first free font to include eye-catching OT features (hopefully helping to popularize OT features to wider audiences who had never heard of it before).
My inspiration for adding OT features at that time where:
1) Some of the automagic fonts from House Industries (I was in love with the animated gifs showing how the features worked), and
2) Jess Latham's Blue Vinyl scripts. They are great ones. They don't receive as much publicity as they deserve. He makes scripts that make clever use of contextual alternates. They are very legible script fonts (as opposed to swash craziness). I think they are great among the best ones.
My current OT Magic Top 3 list is:
1) Underware's Liza, already mentioned, is a masterpiece.
2) Corradine's Sinffonia is also a exceptional one. Sinffonia has quite a lot of swash craziness, but in a controlled manner. There is a lot of very complex code to make sure that the swashes and flourished don't overlap one against each other, making sure that the result is always pleasurable, instead of a tangle of strokes as we are used to see everywhere.
3) Symphony Pro is another underrated one. The OT code and the alternate glyphs make it probably the best connecting formal scripts ever. Don't get fooled by the myfont preview. Take it for a spin and play with the features. It's just great. The original design is form Headliners Inc.
In Libre Caslon Display I've added an /L.shot and a /T.short
/L.short kicks in when used next to an /A. For example in "IMPALLARI", boths /L gets narrower to reduce the admitted white space.
/T.short kicks in when preceding and ascender like /h /b /k /l. For example in "The End". An alternative approach to the Adobe's popular /T_h ligature, similar to John's alternate /f for /f_i, /f_l, etc...
There are 7 sligthly different version of each letter. Each one is selected depending of the preceding and following glyph. The goal is to get natural looking connections and legibility, all using calts instead of ligas.
The first letter (optional) is a solid zero-width shape. The second letter, the ring, is a container which determines the number of characters you want to squeeze in. The following numerals will squeeze in according to whichever ring was chosen.
Toshi Omagari's single-width font experiment during the recent "Font Marathon Challenge” was very clever!
Cowhand - http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mti/cowhand-lite/
ApexNew_OpenType
BurbankFamilyOT
Candy Script.otf
DearSarah-OT.otf
FedraSerifPro
GretaTextStd
Lapture-Family
LocalGothic.otf
LuxuryCollectionOT
P22MysticPro.otf
Yes. That seemed like the appropriate thing to attempt for an all-caps typeface. Admittedly, I could use more sample texts to test against. On the to do list for QA.