#Free fonts with latin glyphs how to

Secondly, I assume that there are all four variations for each letter. Now, in this tutorial, I will make two assumptions: Firstly, I assume that your default glyphs are medial shapes. So, in order to save you a lot of time and nerves, we should find a way to have positional forms appear automatically. In other words, if Glyphs creates those features automatically for you in File > Font Info > Features, consider disabling the features with the respective Disabled checkboxes in the UI, or deleting them by selecting them in the sidebar and pressing the Minus button in the bottom left. These features do not apply to Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew etc., not even if you are making a cursive font. The four positional OpenType features init, medi, fina, isol are meant exclusively for writing systems that have inherent ‘joining behaviour’, e.g., Arabic and similar scripts. The mere phrase ‘activate automatic positional forms’ can drive fear into the hearts of some people. After all, for them, the font they spent their hard-earned money on does not seem to work.

#Free fonts with latin glyphs how to

Many users still do not know how to handle OpenType fonts, and will send you support e-mails. For instance, in InDesign, you need to activate Automatic Positional Forms in the OpenType options. The trouble is only that very few applications make use of the features by default. All you need to do is click on the Refresh button (marked with a circled arrow) at the bottom left in File > Font Info > Features and re-export your font. E.g., if you have both adieresis and adieresis.init in your font, then Glyphs can automatically generate the init feature for you. And you may have guessed it already: You can trigger the automatic creations of these four features by appending their names as suffix to the glyphs.

The four-letter codes init, medi, fina, and isol are the names of the corresponding OpenType features. isol: isolated forms for when a letter stands all by itself

medi: medial forms in the middle of a word init: initial forms at the beginning of a word In total, we can differentiate four possible positions: One of the main problems for script fonts and similar designs is that the letters adopt different shapes depending on their relative position inside a word.