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Stylistic Alternates broken?


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Using AfPub 1.8.3.641 on Win10 x64

When I type something with the "Salsa" Font, freely available e.g. here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/master/ofl/salsa/Salsa-Regular.ttf , the text always uses the contextual alternatives for word beginning and ending. The behavior is the same whether I turn "Swash Letters" (Schwungbuchstabe) in the typography panel on or off. To test, get the font and try with AAA HHH SSS NNN MMM...

May be related to 

 

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12 hours ago, k_au said:

Using AfPub 1.8.3.641 on Win10 x64

When I type something with the "Salsa" Font, freely available e.g. here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/fonts/master/ofl/salsa/Salsa-Regular.ttf , the text always uses the contextual alternatives for word beginning and ending. The behavior is the same whether I turn "Swash Letters" (Schwungbuchstabe) in the typography panel on or off. To test, get the font and try with AAA HHH SSS NNN MMM...

This is not the same issue as the other post.

The Salsa font has the OpenType features Initial Forms (init) and Terminal Forms (fina).
Those features are correctly On by default, and this is why the first letter (init) and the last letter (fina) changes (in some cases).
There are no Contextual Alternates (calt).

But there does seem to be a bug in how APub handles these.
At the bottom of the Topography panel check the box which says Hide irrelevant features.
When you do this the Positional Alternate section will appear.
Then you can use the check boxes to disable the Initial Forms and Terminal Forms.
That should enable you to get the results you want.

This appears to be a bug because:
- when Hide irrelevant features is Off, Figure Position, Superscript, and Subscript appear as a feature.
   This font does not include those OpenType features.
- when Hide irrelevant features is On, then the Positional Alternates appear.
  

Also tested using APub v1.8.3.641 on Win10 x64.

 

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5 hours ago, LibreTraining said:

At the bottom of the Topography panel check the box which says Hide irrelevant features.
When you do this the Positional Alternate section will appear.

Thank you so much, it works!! I somehow did not notice the "Positional Alternate" section appearing when I tried to find a way to turn this off!
Thanks also for the explanation of OpenType terms. I agree, there's a bug somewhere in how the features of this font are processed and presented.

Maybe when the devs get around to it, they could include an option to "show all alternates" for a letter. That would always work as a safety fallback.

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1 hour ago, k_au said:

Maybe when the devs get around to it, they could include an option to "show all alternates" for a letter. That would always work as a safety fallback.

Unfortunately Access All Alternates (aalt) is an OpenType feature which is created by the font developer.
And Salsa does not have this feature.

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Wow, I did not know that this is another OpenType thing... 😳

I was thinking of the functionality in InDesign, where in the Glyphs panel, there's a little triangle at every letter to let you choose the alternatives for that. Also, there's an option that lets you see the alternatives for your selection. I just checked and this does work with the Salsa font (though maybe not 100% perfectly). So I guess it does not rely on the OT feature, but on "manually" collecting the relevant sets.

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10 hours ago, k_au said:

Wow, I did not know that this is another OpenType thing... 😳

I was thinking of the functionality in InDesign, where in the Glyphs panel, there's a little triangle at every letter to let you choose the alternatives for that. Also, there's an option that lets you see the alternatives for your selection. I just checked and this does work with the Salsa font (though maybe not 100% perfectly). So I guess it does not rely on the OT feature, but on "manually" collecting the relevant sets.

That's interesting.
Does it only show the same characters with the other accents (like in your phone editor)?
Or does it also show other alternates like swashes, etc.?

Various OpenType features use substitution tables to look-up and replace the characters/glyphs.
So ID must be scanning those substitution tables and creating that glyphs panel alternates feature.

That is a very useful feature.
You should post that as a feature request in the APub feedback forum above.

 

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@Jon P

Could you please pass this along to development as it does seem to be an issue which should be addressed.

On 5/18/2020 at 11:25 PM, LibreTraining said:

This appears to be a bug because:
- when Hide irrelevant features is Off, Figure Position, Superscript, and Subscript appear as a feature.
   This font does not include those OpenType features.
- when Hide irrelevant features is On, then the Positional Alternates appear.

 

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About that InDesign-like feature: I found something in APub that offers pretty much the same functionality:

Turn on the Glyphs browser, then find the little menu and activate "Unicode and alternatives". Voilà, the various swashes and positional alternatives are shown right after the standard glyphs!

Too bad that there's also a bug in this function:

  • type "AAA" with the Salsa font (with standard settings in the typography panel) -> you'll get three different As (initial, normal, final form)
  • try to replace the initial or final form with a regular form using the Glyphs browser -> does not change the glyph

The "positional alternatives" seem to override the specific glyph chosen by the user. It should be the other way round.

 

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