Ligatures sorting

Konstantinos Siskakis
Konstantinos Siskakis Posts: 9
in Type Design Technique & Theory
I'm going to create a font with ligatures and I was wondering if and how popular applications (like FL or Glyphs) sort them. For example, if there are ligatures with five, four, three, or two glyphs I  would like the ones with the most glyphs to precede those with less. Is that possible?

Comments

  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,032
    What do you mean by “sorting”?

    If you are asking how to insure that the largest possible ligature gets substituted in a given sequence, the AFDKO automatically reorders the compilation of GSUB Type 4 lookups to provide for this.
    A contiguous set of ligature rules does not need to be ordered in any particular way by the font editor; the implementation software must do the appropriate sorting.
    See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_feature_file_syntax.html#5.d

    If you are using a different syntax/tool for developing features, then you may need to account for this yourself when writing your feature rules.

    If you are asking how they get sorted in the glyph order of the font (for display in a Glyph Palette, for example), then different font editors handle how the glyphs get ordered in a compiled font in different ways. You’d have to check the documentation for your particular software.
  • Konstantinos Siskakis
    Konstantinos Siskakis Posts: 9
    Thank you Kent, this is all I was looking for!
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 319
    Like most other font editors, FontCreator takes care of the order.
  • Beau Williamson
    Beau Williamson Posts: 80
    edited October 2016
    At least in fontlab, you can switch to index mode and manually change the order of glyphs.

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