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Hebrew elongated justification #402
Description
Activity
I know Culmus has support for
jalt, see https://culmus.sourceforge.io/opentype/.@nmccamish well yes, see the example above :) Note that currently some fonts in culmus (such as David CLM) the jalt table points to empty glyphs, Maxim is working on a fix.
Does the jalt table allow for more than one alternate / width to it? I'd expect something like METAFONT would be ideal for a truly variable width, but are there any fonts currently available that have at least two different alternates?
Does the jalt table allow for more than one alternate / width to it?
The spec recommends not to do that:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/features_fj#tag-jalt
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/gsub#lookup-type-1-subtable-single-substitutionI'm not sure if that means there is no font that do that in practice.
I'd expect something like METAFONT would be ideal for a truly variable width
METAFONT doesn't have any notion of these concepts, as it was built way before opentype fonts were created. In fact I believe it was created with the idea that interword space is used for justification, not font features.
Some Hebrew fonts provide a just feature which substitute some letters with a wider version. This was historically used to help justification, and although not commonly used today it will be a nice feature to have. The common letters with wide variants are aleph, dalet, he, kaf, lamed, final mem, resh and tav, you can find the wide variant in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms block. The implementation should be similar to how it is done for Arabic (maybe with some configuration to which characters should be elongated).