Re: Vertically Centered Colon
Re: Vertically Centered Colon
- Subject: Re: Vertically Centered Colon
- From: Doug Hill <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2016 10:23:37 -0800
> On Nov 29, 2016, at 10:04 AM, Quincey Morris <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Nov 29, 2016, at 09:38 , Doug Hill <email@hidden <mailto:email@hidden>> wrote:
>>
>> But seriously, why didn’t Apple document what those stylistic alernative type attribute constants are? Are they supposed to change? Did they not know what they correspond to when creating the header? Did they not expect that developers would use this feature?
>
> My guess is because there aren’t any definitions, but these are instead optional font-specific features with generic identifications. And, lo and behold, when I went to check on this:
>
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features#OpenType_typographic_features <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features#OpenType_typographic_features>
>
> there they are [well, I presume this is them] under the heading “Ligation and alternate forms features intended for all scripts” as “Stylistic Set 1 – 20”. Indeed, if you look at the example of Stylistic Set 04 here:
>
> ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html <http://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html>
>
> it even looks like the meaning of the set is somehow defined within the font.
>
> (Note that there appear to be “stylistic alternates”, and “stylistic sets” which are a specific kind of stylistic alternate, so the whole system seems more complicated than I was able to grasp in 5 minutes of searching.)
>
> I’m ready to stand corrected, but — unless there’s a separate registry or convention on what the sets mean — this appears to me to indicate that the centered colon may only work for SF and perhaps a set of other Apple-tweaked fonts that are intended to have the same behavior.
Indeed many of these features are likely SF font specific. However, these features are known to Apple’s developers. For example, check out the Typography settings of a font in the Macintosh Font Panel. It knows which features are available for any font and shows their name when switching fonts. So the mapping between OpenType setting and SF font feature is known somewhere, but not to SDK users.
But thanks for the links, very good info which I don’t understand all of it either. You can go down this font rat-hole as far as you want; I don’t think it ever ends. :)
Doug
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