Font Features their purpose and benefits

Question

I have never used font features in Paratext, but I have heard of people using them with the Andika font. What are the advantages of using font features over having a specialized font created? What other common fonts support Paratext’s font features? So far I have only found that Andika works with font features.

Answer 1

anon044949:

I have never used font features in Paratext, but I have heard of people using them with the Andika font. What are the advantages of using font features over having a specialized font created?

Hi anon044949,

I guess the answer depends a lot on what you mean by “having a specialized font created”. Creating quality fonts from scratch is lengthy and costly process, and even modifying existing open-source fonts takes specialized skills and tools and is still pretty costly (in time if not money).

On the other hand, if the fonts already have user-selectable features that do what you need, then it is simply a matter of turning on the desired feature(s) using the formatting or style menus in your application (assuming it provides a user-interface to access the features).

Or were you thinking of an easier mechanism such as SIL’s TypeTuner Web? This, of course, simply uses the features already in the font and is provided as a stop-gap for applications that don’t provide a user-interface for feature selection.

What other common fonts support Paratext’s font features? So far I have only found that Andika works with font features.

I’m not a Paratext user so don’t know what limitations it may have, but all of the following SIL-provided fonts have user-selectable features (usually implemented in both Graphite and OpenType technologies):

• Abyssinica SIL
• Andika
• Annapurna SIL
• Charis SIL
• Doulos SIL
• Gentium
• Harmattan
• Scheherazae

and I’ve probably missed some. You can find links to all of these (and more) on the NRSI fonts page.

Answer 2

Font Features are only available for Graphite fonts. See this for more information about Font Features (in the User Defined Features section).

Comments

Well I’m not quite sure what happened to that post from my email, but let me try again directly in the forum…

anon291708 wrote:

Font Features are only available for Graphite fonts.

In a broader context, that statement could be misleading so I didn’t want folks to be confused. Specifically: many SIL fonts have user-selectable features in both OpenType and Graphite technology. Andika New Basic, for example, has all the same features available through both OpenType and Graphite. More generally, SIL font documentation details what features are available from which technology.

Now, it may be that a given application makes such features available to users via only one of the two technologies, but that doesn’t mean the font doesn’t implement them.

Regards,
BobH