Girish Mahajan (Editor)

List of typographic features

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State-of-the-art digital typographic systems have solved virtually all the demands of traditional typography and have expanded the possibilities with many new features. Three systems are in common use: OpenType, devised by Microsoft and Adobe, Apple's Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), and SIL's Graphite. The lists below provide information about OpenType and AAT features. Graphite does not have a fixed set of features; instead it provides a way for fonts to define their own features.

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OpenType typographic features

The OpenType format defines a number of typographic features that a particular font may support; some software, such as Adobe InDesign or recent versions of Lua/XeTeX, gives users control of these, for example to enable fancy stylistic capital letters (swash caps) or to choose between ranging (full-height) and non-ranging (old-style, or lower-case) digits.

The following tables list the features defined in version 1.7 of the OpenType specification. The codes in the "type" column are explained after the tables. OpenType features may be applicable only to certain language scripts or specific languages, or in certain writing modes. The features are split into several tables accordingly.

Legend of substitution and positioning codes

Below are listed the OpenType lookup table types, as used in the "type" column in the above tables. S stands for substitution, and P stands for positioning. Note that often a feature can be implemented by more than one type of table, and that sometimes the specification fails to explicitly indicate the table type.

AAT typographic features

Features that take one value, mutual exclusive from the rest:

  • Annotation nalt
  • No Annotation
  • Box Annotation
  • Rounded Box Annotation
  • Circle Annotation
  • Inverted Circle Annotation
  • Parenthesis Annotation
  • Period Annotation
  • Roman Numeral Annotation
  • Diamond Annotation
  • Character Alternatives
  • No Alternates
  • … rand; aalt, calt, falt, jalt, salt, ssXX, hkna/vkna, rtla, vrt2
  • Character Shape half, ruby; ljmo, vjmo, tjmo
  • Traditional Characters trad
  • Simplified Characters smpl
  • JIS 1978 Characters jp78
  • JIS 1983 Characters jp83
  • JIS 1990 Characters jp90
  • Traditional Characters, Alternative Set 1…5 tnam, hojo, nlck
  • Expert Characters expt, locl
  • CJK Roman Spacing
  • Half-width hwid, halt
  • Proportional pwid, palt
  • Default Roman
  • Full-width Roman fwid
  • Cursive Connection init, medi/med2, fina/fin2/fin3; haln, nukt, vatu, rphf, pres, pstf/psts
  • Unconnected isol
  • Partially Connected calt, clig
  • Cursive curs
  • Design Complexity
  • Design Level 1
  • Design Level …
  • Diacritics
  • Show Diacritics
  • Hide Diacritics
  • Decompose Diacritics ccmp
  • Fractions
  • No Fractions
  • Vertical Fractions afrc
  • Diagonal Fractions frac, dnom, numr
  • Ideographic Spacing
  • Full Width fwid
  • Proportional pwid, palt
  • Kana Spacing
  • Full Width fwid
  • Proportional pwid, palt
  • Letter Case case
  • Upper & Lower Case
  • All Caps
  • All Lower Case
  • Small Caps smcp, pcap
  • Initial Caps c2sc, c2pc
  • Initial Caps and Small Caps
  • Number Case
  • Lower Case Numbers onum
  • Upper Case Numbers lnum
  • Number Spacing
  • Monospaced Numbers tnum
  • Proportional Numbers pnum
  • Ornament Sets ornm
  • None
  • Dingbats
  • Pi Characters
  • Fleurons
  • Decorative Borders
  • International Symbols
  • Math Symbols mgrk
  • Text Spacing
  • Proportional pwid, palt
  • Monospace fwid
  • Half-width hwid, halt
  • Normal
  • Vertical Position
  • No Vertical Position
  • Superiors supr
  • Inferiors subs, sinf
  • Ordinals ordn

    • Features that take a number of values:

  • Ligatures
  • Required Ligatures rlig, clig
  • Common Ligatures liga
  • Rare Ligatures hlig, dlig
  • Logos
  • Rebus Pictures
  • Diphthong Ligatures
  • Squared Ligatures
  • Squared Ligatures, Abbreviated
  • Mathematical Extras
  • Hyphen to Minus (‘-’ → ‘−’)
  • Asterisk to Multiply (‘*’ → ‘×’)
  • Slash to Divide (‘/’ → ‘÷’)
  • Inequality Ligatures
  • Exponents
  • Smart Swashes swsh, cswh
  • Word Initial Swashes
  • Word Final Swashes
  • Line Initial Swashes
  • Line Final Swashes falt
  • Non-Final Swashes jalt
  • Style Options
  • No Style Options
  • Display Text size
  • Engraved Text
  • Illuminated Caps
  • Titling Caps titl
  • Tall Caps
  • Transliteration locl
  • No Transliteration
  • Hanja to Hangul
  • Hanja to Hangul, Alternative Set 1…3
  • Hiragana to Katakana
  • Katakana to Hiragana
  • Kana to Romanization
  • Romanization to Hiragana
  • Romanization to Katakana
  • Typographic Extras
  • Hyphens to Em Dash (‘--’ → ‘—’)
  • Hyphen to En Dash (‘-’ → ‘–’)
  • Unslashed Zero zero
  • Form Interrobang (‘!?’/‘?!’ → ‘‽’)
  • Smart Quotes (‘"'"’ → ‘“’”’)
  • Periods to Ellipsis (‘...’ → ‘…’)

    • Binary features that can only be turned on:

  • All Typographic Features
  • Linguistic Rearrangement
  • Overlapping Characters
  • Vertical Substitution

    • References

    List of typographic features Wikipedia
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