Caractéristiques
Empowered by OpenTypeOpenType is the magical word when it comes to modern respectively smart font technologies. It is not the only one, there are also Apple aat (restricted to Apple systems and probably dying out already) and sil Graphite (mostly available in open source products like XeTeX and LibreOffice) but it’s the most common one and quasi standard. OpenType fonts come in two flavours that differ in the way the outlines are described, the one containing cubic bezier splines (cff fonts, usually as otf-files), the others containing quadratic bezier splines (Truestype fonts, usually as ttf-files). Also, ttf-files contain much more sophisticated hinting which is necessary to make fonts look acceptable on most Windows systems. What makes an OpenType font a smart font are tables containing rules for glyph substitution and positioning that are compiled into the font files alongside the spline coordinates. Some of the features are applied automatically, others however obey the control of the user and EB Garamond fonts make heavy use of this possibility.
Locals
This feature accomodates some local typographic traditions:
- German
- This locale prevents undesirable ligatures like ffl, fb, fh etc.
- Turkic languages
- In Turkish, Crimean Tartar and Azerbaijani the differentiation between i and ı makes special treatment necessary when it comes to smallcaps and ligatures.
- Catalan
- Replace l· (middot) with ŀ
- Latin
- Emulate a historical style: u and v are positional alternates of each other, ligate a+e to æ and o+e to œ: universum, coelum, rosae
- Serbian and Makedonian
- Localized forms of б and б д г ѓ п т: б б д г ѓ п т
Ligatures
Several sets of ligatures are present:
- Standard ligatures (liga*)
- This set contains the well known f-ligatures: ff → ff, fi → fi, ffi → ffi