FF Kosmik in Open Type
Ever since I read the first specs of OpenType I thought about implementing some kind of flipper device with glyph substitution. The OpenType GSUB tools offer conditional replacement of glyphs. That means that the designer can specify that a certain shape is used only when it is surrounded (or preceded) by specific other shapes. It is possible to build substitution tables that prevent character shapes from repeating right next to each other, and FF Kosmik is the perfect typeface to make use of it. Now that the PostScript implementation of Kosmik stopped working it seemed a good idea to convert the typeface.
John Butler of Eccentrifuge engineered the substitution tables in such a way that the glyph replacement in OpenType is actually smarter than the original Flipper mechanism in PostScript. The alternatives in the original fonts were selected with a simple 1-2-3-1.. routine. A word like 'ANNA' or 'OTTO' would therefor show the same glyph at the beginning and end of the word. The OpenType implementation looks two characters ahead and discovers that there is another 'A' two characters ahead and quickly switches the shape for an alternative. The result is a more lively text but using the same number of alternatives per character.
I added lining and non lining figures in tabular and fractional widths. John Butler added support for Turkish and a slew of accented characters.
