Contextual Alternates in OpenType Fonts

As OpenType was developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft, it’s not surprising that the Adobe type library was the first to be converted entirely to OpenType format. All of the Adobe Originals typefaces, as well as typefaces Adobe licensed from other foundries, are available as OpenType fonts. Many of the Originals, too, have been developed as OpenType Pro fonts, which include extended multilingual support and may include advanced typographic features. As Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts and core technologies at Adobe, pointed out to me after my article in issue 3 of InDesign Magazine, the “Pro” designation actually refers only to extended Latin-alphabet language support; some of the Adobe Originals also include Greek and Cyrillic character sets, but that’s not required for a font to be called “Pro.” Nor are extra typographic features necessary, although Adobe is known for providing those.

In some of its fonts, Adobe has deliberately pushed the possibilities of OpenType technology in order to show how it can make finer typography easy for a font-user to apply. In particular, the OpenType “contextual features” — changes that take place depending on the context of how the type is being set and what else is in a block of text —make some surprising effects possible. The most spectacular of these may be Bickham Script Pro, an extended version of Richard Lipton’s earlier Adobe Originals typeface, Bickham Script.

A Business Hand for the Eighteenth Century

Bickham Script is an ambitious script typeface that makes extensive use of “contextual ligatures” and “contextual alternates.” It’s a copperplate script, based on an English writing style of the 18th century; although it may seem surprising to us now, this “round hand” style was commonly used in business correspondence at the time. Its basic letterforms are solid and even,

with the high contrast and steep angle that come from writing with a pointed quill (Figure 1). An 18th-century English writing master might be delighted with the regularity achieved in Bickham Script, but what we notice, since this is a modern digital font rather than an individual’s handwriting, is the variation and irregularity that OpenType can give to the words.

The spectacular part of the Bickham Script design is in its extenders and swashes, which give color and verve to an essentially utilitarian central design. This is a far cry, of course, from what wed expect in business correspondence today; Bickham Script was developed as a display typeface, suitable for invitations and menu headings and short pieces of large text where a fancy handwritten style may look appropriate. Since Lipton has given the typeface three weights (something unknown in the 18th century), it has a wide range of expression for a script face. Like Zapfino Extra, a very different style of calligraphic typeface that we showed last issue, Bickham Script Pro has a huge number of alternate forms for many of the letters, and when OpenTypes contextual alternates are turned on for a block of text in InDesign, the font will intelligently substitute various forms of the letter depending on context. (Contextual ligatures and contextual alternates are turned on by default in both InDesign and Photoshop, so you don’t have to do anything special in order to use these features. In the current version of Illustrator, however, they are not turned on by default–though of course all you’d have to do to use them is turn them on, either by selecting Contextual Alternates from the OpenType palette submenu or by clicking on the corresponding icon in the palette.) You can watch this process happen as you type (Figure 2). You may, of course, turn off this feature through InDesign’s OpenType options on the Character palettes submenu; or you can use the Glyph palette to choose your own variant letterforms by hand. But the ease and smoothness of letting InDesign and the font itself do the work make it absurdly easy to get sophisticated typography in a document. One way in which Bickham Script Pro goes even farther than Zapfino Extra, according to Adobe’s Thomas Phinney, is that “the context can actually go across words, which means that a word like the can show up three or four different ways on the same line, without applying any different formatting.” This requires, of course, more than one alternate form for the letters; in the case of “the” Bickham Script Pro has nine different “th” ligatures. “Individual letters”” says Phinney, “often have 20-30 alternate forms.”

Artificial “Ed” telligence

At the opposite end of the display-lettering universe, House Industries has just released the Ed Benguiat Font Collection, a series of display faces based on the commercial lettering and type design of the prolific New York graphic designer Ed Benguiat. One of the five fonts in the series, Ed Interlock, puts OpenTypes contextual features to work to achieve a very different effect from that of Bickham Script. The one thing they have in common is that both are meant to look spontaneous, as though they had just been done by hand. House Industries, in its usual wisecracking way, refers to this as “tricknological wizardry” and calls the way the fonts works “artificial ‘Ed’telligence.” The letters in Ed Interlock look bouncy and blocky, the sort you might see in playful headlines from the 1960s or 1970s (and indeed what you saw then might have been done by Ed Benguiat). Although Benguiat himself says that “I originally included a bunch of alternate letters for Photo-Lettering composition,” House’s Ken Barber drew “nearly 1,400 custom ligatures for Ed Interlock in order to mimic real hand-done lettering.” Ed Interlock has a cheerful lowercase, with the usual f-ligatures and such, but the real heart of the font is in its caps: in an all-caps setting, the wealth of multi-letter ligatures can produce a tight block of closely interlocked letters (Figure 3).

The way Ed Interlock is programmed, it uses OpenTypes contextual ligatures to choose the most appropriate combination of shapes for each particular word. This involves letters of variable size that overhang each other or tuck under each other’s extended arms; the font mixes these up within a word so that the resulting shape won’t be either top-heavy or bottom-heavy (Figure 4). As in Bickham Script, you can see this happen as you type. House Industries was a pioneer in using the extended features of OpenType. “We have been shipping our fonts with extended OpenType features since we released the Simian Fonts in 2001,” says House’s Rich Roat. “The display version had ligature substitution features. We used the bare-bones Adobe Font Development Kit when we built them because there were no commercial font programs that supported OpenType.” Neutraface, released in 2002, also makes extensive use of OpenType features for typographic refinements like small caps, ligatures, and multiple styles of numerals. Roat says that House Industries ships all of its fonts in OpenType format except for Bullet, Scrawl, General Collection, and Bad Neighborhood. “We haven’t gotten around to them yet.” Since the time when House Industries had to do its own software engineering in order to add features to OpenType fonts, commercial font-making programs have caught up. In addition to free tools from Adobe and Microsoft, both FontLab and DTL FontMaster support the creation of OpenType fonts with rich typographic features, and some foundries, such as Bitstream, have developed their own tools for this purpose. That means that we can expect to see more and more new fonts that take advantage of the possibilities of OpenType. I’ll look at a few of them in the next article in this series.