Frequently I get involved in the OpenType posts when there are issues with a given font. Typically those fonts have mechanical (technical) errors which keep them from displaying properly in CD. So I wanted to balance that out with something positive.
While I do layout work for my main source of revenue, I also work with fonts quite often. Most of the time my work with fonts is for other font designers where I will add or modify glyphs and often enough extend the available glyphs for other languages. I add OT Feature scripting, or also expand/correct existing OT Feature scripting. But I also create my own fonts as well. Regardless of the source of the fonts I work on, this means rather extensive testing in many applications.
Among those applications I use for testing is CorelDraw X8. I can rely on CD and two other applications (but not always the same other application) to process OT Features properly. If this sounds like a Duh! it isn't.
A couple cases in point. One of my own fonts uses the fraction feature in a manner that is beyond most fonts (but there are a couple that work similar, though not as extensively). I set a couple cookbooks this past year in the font below and another of my own making (a sans-serif font). Most all fonts cannot have the fraction feature simply turned on for the paragraph style, which means one needs to either script a solution (using for instance either javascript or GREP styles in ID) or painstakingly go through the pages, highlight each fraction and choose for those highlighted numbers to use the fraction feature in the OpenType font of choice. But I didn't want to do either of those methods.
The problem is that not all applications fully process the OT Feature that makes the fraction feature work properly--which are called Contextual Alternates wrapped into the Fraction Feature code. Most of these applications simply stop working properly after they process a few of the CA's once they find a match and move on to the next instruction. This doesn't happen in CDX8.
Here's a screen shot of dummy text with the Fraction feature simply turned on as well as using the Proportional Figures (old style figures are the default in this font). This is where QuarkXPress fails--the old style figures are not replaced in the date text below.
This font was originally created to set a couple historical books. Which means I needed to set the text with historical forms of the letters of which the "long s" is featured prominently throughout--how many words use the 's' character in the English language? A lot. Which means the longs is used a lot. But back in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there were some rules for where to use the longs and these rules differed between England and the Continent as well as during different periods. The font I created is taken from the printing of several volumes of what are basically encyclopedias.
The "long s" (longs) is basically the f character without the crossbar going all the way through the upright stem. Which means it can be confused easily enough for words that contain 's' and 'f' characters. Some of the usage rules cover these problems. Like if the 's' character is immediately followed by an 'f' or immediately follows an 'f', then it should be the 's' character we are accustom to. As well, if the 's' character is the last character in a word, then it needs to be the lowercase 's' we all know. And if the word is a hypenated word which has an 's' character before the hyphen. If the word is an abbreviation which ends with a period then it is a longs used. And if a word has three successive 's' characters, then the middle 's' is the one we use today. See what I mean about rules? There are more rules, but the above is enough to show the screen shot below.
Whew, I was a bit long-winded. All that to say I appreciate all the hard work Claude and others have done to make use of OpenType Features. So thanks, Corel, for having these hard working people working for you.
Mike