Overview

Many fonts use limited character encoding standards that map glyphs to characters one-to-one, assigning a glyph to each character code value in a font. Multiple character codes cannot be mapped to a single glyph, as needed for ligature glyphs, and multiple glyphs cannot be mapped to a single character code, as needed to decompose a ligature into its component glyphs.

To supply glyph substitutes, font developers must assign different character codes to the glyphs, or they must create additional fonts or character sets. To access these glyphs, users must bear the burden of switching between character codes, character sets, or fonts.

Substituting Glyphs with TrueType Open

The GSUB table in TrueType Open fully supports glyph substitution. To access glyph substitutes, GSUB maps from the glyph index or indices defined in a cmap table to the glyph index or indices of the glyph substitutes. For example, if a font has three alternative forms of an ampersand glyph, the cmap table associates the ampersand's character code with only one of these glyphs. In GSUB, the indices of the other ampersand glyphs are then referenced by this one index.

The text-processing client uses the GSUB data to manage glyph substitution actions. GSUB identifies the glyphs that are input to and output from each glyph substitution action, specifies how and where the client uses glyph substitutes, and regulates the order of glyph substitution operations. Any number of substitutions can be defined for each script or language system represented in a font.

The GSUB table supports five types of glyph substitutions that are widely used in international typography:

A single substitution replaces a single glyph with another single glyph. This is used to render positional glyph variants in Arabic and vertical text in the Far East (see Figure 3c).

Figure 3c. Alternative forms of parentheses used when positioning Kanji vertically

A multiple substitution replaces a single glyph with more than one glyph. This is used to specify actions such as ligature decomposition (see Figure 3d).

Figure 3d. Decomposing a Latin ligature glyph into its individual glyph components

An alternate substitution identifies functionally equivalent but different looking forms of a glyph. These glyphs are often referred to as aesthetic alternatives. For example, a font might have five different glyphs for the ampersand symbol, but one would have a default glyph index in the cmap table. The client could use the default glyph or substitute any of the four alternatives (see Figure 3e).

Figure 3e. Alternative ampersand glyphs in a font

A ligature substitution replaces several glyph indices with a single glyph index, as when an Arabic ligature glyph replaces a string of separate glyphs (see Figure 3f) .

Figure 3f. Three Arabic glyphs and their associated ligature glyph

Contextual substitution, the most powerful type, describes glyph substitutions in context–that is, a substitution of one or more glyphs within a certain pattern of glyphs. Each substitution describes one or more input glyph sequences and one or more substitutions to be performed on that sequence. Contextual substitutions can be applied to specific glyph sequences, glyph classes, or sets of glyphs.