Best way to offer single glyph-alternate, non opentype

[Ryan Maelhorn]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I have a font I am offering and have a single mirror imaged(horizontally) Uppercase Q in the set.

I quite like it personally, but realize this will ruin its potential use for organizations whose name begins with Q.

I would like to offer an easy to use alternate proper Q, but can not use opentype.

I was thinking of creating a font family, having the regular version be with the proper Q, and have the "italic" version with the backwards Q. There will be no REAL italics in the family, and I thought this would be a nice and neat way of solving the problem.

advice?

[oldnick]

Alternately, you could simply place the Q.alt in a seldom-used slot, like the currency symbol or logical not...

[hrant]

I think Ryan's hack is a lesser evil, because at least if you change the font the alt /Q doesn't become gibberish. But I'd rather see Bold be recruited instead Italic.

hhp

[eliason]

So you'd expect the user to install a second font called italic (or bold) that was the same in every regard except the direction of the /Q/? That seems like it would be more confusing than oldnick's solution to me.

[Theunis de Jong]

Why? Making it a separate font (1) makes it easy for the user to change any or all Q's appearance, and (2) preserves the original "data behind the font" (it's still a regular "Q", as far as changing the font, searching, and copying is concerned).

But I'm curious about Ryan's

I would like to offer an easy to use alternate proper Q, but can not use opentype.

statement. Are you not allowed by someone? Doesn't your software support this? Don't you know how?

[JamesT]

Why not just make a "display" version instead of using a workaround like using the italics?

[agisaak]

I agree with JamesT -- a separate font (display or alternate or whatever) is probably preferable. Apart from a general aversion to misleading style naming, you face two potential problems with using italid or bold:

(1) If the user 'italicizes' or 'bolds' a passage which contains no Q, and thus sees no change, they may come to think the font is defective or that it is not installed.

(2) If you ever do decide to design an italic or bold weight, you face all sorts of backwards compatibility issues.

André

[Cristobal Henestrosa]

I’d go for naming the font something like “[Name of your typeface] Alt Q”.

[ahyangyi]

I think an alternate font is the best way.

By the way, what about (ab)using the Cyrillic Q codepoint (Ԛ, Unicode 051A)?

[Ryan Maelhorn]

How would that work for the user, ahyangyi? Would they have to open the windows character map and copy and paste it, or type in some obscure character code?

What would really be awesome is if when the user presses SHIFT + Q, they would get the regular Q; but if they press ALT + Q they would get the alternate. Not sure if this is possible however.

[Riccardo Sartori]

SHIFT + Q, they would get the regular Q; but if they press ALT + Q they would get the alternate.

You will need to provide a custom keyboard layout (and instructions on how to use it) along the font for make it happen.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Unfortunately, ALT is used a lot for shortcuts in software. I would think the system could overwrite an ALT + Q key press combination to do whatever the currently running piece of software wants it to do, even when the user is entering text.

Am I wrong? I wish there was a way.

[Riccardo Sartori]

I wish there was a way.

As I already said: custom keyboard layout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Customized_functional_layouts

[John Hudson]

If you want the character to be searchable/sortable as 'Q', then it needs to be encoded as 'Q' and not as some other character. Hijacking standard codepoints of other characters for such a purpose would be particularly frowned upon; using a Private Use Area codepoint would be cleaner, but still would mean that the glyph is encoded as something other than 'Q'.

OpenType is the obvious way to handle this, because OpenType Layout is specifically designed to resolve this issue: to allow more than one glyph to represent a single character.

[Theunis de Jong]

John, Ryan is somehow unable to use OpenType:

..but [I] can not use opentype..

I guess it'll remain a mystery forever why he cannot.

[John Hudson]

Oh yes, I understood that he feels unable to use OpenType, but wanted to point out exactly why OpenType is the proper solution.

[Té Rowan]

@Ryan – There is. It's on the other side of the space bar: AltGr (Alternate Graphics)