Create Font with Letter Combinations

Posted by khedaywi in

General Discussions

21 Jul 2009 — 6:44pm

I'm creating a handwritten font right now. Had a question if anyone can help?

I'm currently using Fontographer to create.

Can I make the font so that when two Zs (e.g. ZZ) are typed together they will produce a different looking combination effect versus if I use a Z in another way (e.g. Za or ZA)? Basically, ZZ is stylized a different way from a regular Z.

I think this is called a ligature, but I'm new to font creation and new to Fontographer. I only found one mention of ligatures in the Fontographer manual.

Thanks in advance for the instruction.

mk2
21 Jul 2009 — 8:21pm

Yes, it's called ligatures. You can set a character substitution using OpenType feature tag which goes like this:

# Ligature formation
feature liga {
substitute f i by f_i;
substitute f l by f_l;
} liga;

You can find more sample of this at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_feature_file_syntax.html

Unfortunately, you can't write those feature tags in Fontographer. Fortunately, you can use a tool called VOLT which is freely downloadable from:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/VOLT.mspx

Good luck!

khedaywi
23 Jul 2009 — 3:20pm

Awesome. Figured out how to do it...not in Fontographer unfortunately.

feature liga {
substitute Z Z by Z_Z;
}liga;

The above worked like a champ where the new "Double Z" glyph was named Z_Z

Thanks!

whoneedselectricity
23 Jul 2009 — 6:23pm

Could we maybe see some samples?

Create Font with Letter Combinations

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