Consensus on uppercase punctuation and math symbols?

Joon Park
Joon Park Posts: 56
in Type Design Technique & Theory
What would be the ideal setup for the opentype font?

Keep all the default ones designed for lowercase (ie. colon, hyphen, brackets, plus, equal and etc.)  and make uppercase aligned version separately?

Comments

  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,771
    Basically, yes. That's what the case feature is for.
  • Joon Park
    Joon Park Posts: 56
    Mark Simonson said:
    Basically, yes. That's what the case feature is for.
    Alright then, go all the way make full use of it. (I only made use of case for some puncuation and brackets)
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,317
    You don’t need to make duplicate glyphs.
    This code can be put in the case feature and will raise the marks.
        pos @UCsymbols <0 50 0 0>;

    However, it complicates kerning.

  • Michael Jarboe
    Michael Jarboe Posts: 265
    Can it really be said that aligning all those symbols for lowercase is best practice? Math symbols seem to be a separate consideration and shouldn't necessarily be bundled in with basic punctuation. Designing/aligning math symbols to work with lowercase makes the most sense if oldstyle numerals are the default, but not so much if lining numerals are default.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,023
    I have also seen a problem with the GPOS {case} strategy applied to a hyphen. It was several years ago and things may have changed, but there was an issue in InDesign with soft hyphenation at the end of lines when text was styled in All-Caps. The glyph was “pinked out” and missing.

    At the time, we just abandoned trying to use GPOS for this. I’ve never revisited the matter to see if time and more experience provide any new insights.
  • Joon Park
    Joon Park Posts: 56
    Michael Jarboe said:
    Can it really be said that aligning all those symbols for lowercase is best practice? Math symbols seem to be a separate consideration and shouldn't necessarily be bundled in with basic punctuation. Designing/aligning math symbols to work with lowercase makes the most sense if oldstyle numerals are the default, but not so much if lining numerals are default.
    Lowercase letters are also used with math symbols when displaying equations and stuff. So i figured it would be a lot simple and organized to have it that way.

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