Some crazy font, futuracha

[Hoogo]

Futuracha in indiegogo
This makes me wonder how ligatures work technically? A huge list of combined letters and how to replace them with own graphics or combinations of graphics?

[bkh]

Yes, at least that's the way the Zapfino calligraphy font works (you can see all the ligature glyphs in the font using the Font book on OS X).

Cheers

Burkhard.

[mwenz]

They are not only using ligatures.

But as for a ligature (I think they say there are 35 ligs) the code is simply expressed like:

lookup Ligature2 {
sub D T -> D_T;
}

Which as you can surmise is if the ligature feature is turned on, then any time the letter combination of D T is typed, to replace it with the single glyph D_T. I have one font that has just over 1000 ligatures. That's a lot of work to design. But once done, ligatures are reasonably easy to code in the font.

What I think they are also doing is a bit more complex. Which use a Contextual Context look-up, which can look behind as well as look forward and use what is called a Chaining Context substitution. This method is more flexible than using ligatures as it is class-based and one doesn't have to build actual glyph combinations like the above ligature substitution. Instead, there are classes of glyphs that can be swapped out while being typed and when the word boundary occurs (end of word, like a space, etc.) there can be yet further glyph swapping to finish off the word. As well, Chaining Contexts can have multiple rules. One of the fonts I am finishing up has 6 different rules that apply the medial s (longs) according to a certain period of France's history (it's for a book that quotes text from 1790 to 1830 and so I targeted those rules).

In any case, looks like a fun font. Thanks for pointing it out.

Mike

[Hoogo]

Still only some more complicated descriptions for looking up, no complete programming language included? Phew...

But it would be possible to create a maze game by replacing a chain of l/r/f (left/right/forward) with graphics? Or a whole adventure by replacing a chain of choices with describing graphics?

[mwenz]

OT feature script can be daunting at first, but at its core it is an extremely simple "language." Really, there are simply feature declarations and proper (very simple) syntax for the calling of and structure of the features. There is little to no error-checking. Syntax checking, yes. But not how it all relates to each other. Certain OT features are order dependent and take precedence over others. While this is more or less described and loosely documented, there is no authoritative "flow chart" of the various combinations of features and how the interact.

Hmm. A maze? There is no inherent logic in a font that would be able to anticipate I need a space here, solid here, where the end result would be what we call a maze. What could be done without much thought is to think through the relatively few pieces needed to represent the blocks themselves and combinations of blocks, and create the glyphs. One would likely need a Key of the glyphs and their keyboard mapping.

Which is why it would be easier to resolve in an application made for mazes.