Feature request: alternate glyph support (OpenType)

[Bram Wayman]

The only thing making me consider the switch to InDesign is the fact that InkScape can't access OpenType glyph alternates in professional fonts, nor make use of the marvelous automatic capacities of OpenType such as contextual alternates. I vastly prefer InkScape otherwise, and want to keep using it permanently—but for many typographers, this feature is necessary.

[Bram Wayman (bram-wayman)]

P.S. I expect this has been requested many times before. I would work on it myself if my programming skills were beyond rudimentary! Please, someone recognize the critical necessity and practicality of this feature.

[Peter Sarvaš (vanstiphout)]

This is important for me too.

[Andrea Lazzarotto (Lazza) (andrea-lazzarotto)]

So funny how this is marked as "wishlist".

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Andrea: Because we don't currently support it, but it's not a bug either. The description when going to set "Importance" has the following for Wishlist "Not a bug. It's an enhancement/new feature."

[Joshua Trees (jtrees)]

I am also very interested in the implementation of this feature.

[nicolas (nclmar)]

This would be a very desirable feature indeed!

There is currently some amount of discussion about UIs for setting OpenType features –and the poor state of the existing ones– following two articles on I Love Typography: http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/22/better-ui-for-better-typography-adobe-petition/ (Adobe specific) and http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/25/why-a-better-opentype-user-interface-matters/ by Yves Peters.

One of the answer to this has been a proposed interface by Kris Sowersby, described there: https://klim.co.nz/blog/towards-an-ideal-opentype-user-interface/

It’s application-agnostic, and it may be a really good reference when the feature will be built into Inkscape. Maybe Inkscape could even be the first software to offer such a qualitative interface for this!

[nicolas (nclmar)]

Should this issue be renamed to ‘OpenType features support’ to cover all OpenType features at once or should a new one be created?

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Nicolas: I would say it wouldn't hurt to file a new one for other opentype features. Alternate glyphs is all some people know about, so this suffices for that.

A monolithic report for all opentype features might seem daunting for any interested developers vs it broken down into a couple different requests.

[nicolas (nclmar)]

Right, thanks, I created Bug #1386778 as an overall request. We could link to individual feature support request from there.

[Thilo-Alexander Ginkel (thilo.ginkel)]

According to http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1442 alternate glyph support is now available in Inkscape Trunk, so it is only a matter of time it will end up in Ubuntu. Trunk builds are available at https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/ubuntu/trunk, but I don't think that they are sufficient as a recent version of Pango would be needed in addition.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Requires pango >= 1.37.1 (at build and run time).

Related commits:
14115, 14148, 14152, 14155, 14162, 14163, 14206, 14207, 14208, 14215

[Chad Miller (cmiller)]

Linked bug to Ubuntu packaging of Inkscape. This should be available in distro by now, I think.

[ScislaC (scislac)]

Chad: That is incorrect. 0.92 has not been released yet, therefore there is nothing for Ubuntu to package yet.