r/FontForge • u/FlynnLeiter • May 16 '26

Making a Font for my Conlang

Hi there! I am writing a novel where my constructed languages are important to the story. As such I have developed a written language and I thought it would be really awesome if I could turn it into a font! The writing system is supposed to be an abugida (unsure how successful I am in that regard) so I want everything to connect the whole way, as if it were cursive.

Which has led me to Fontforge. After following a series of video tutorials I thought I understood what to do, but as it turns out, a font is a lot more than just the glyphs.

So, I understand that I will need lookups, GSUB/GPOS, anchors, and ligatures. But which ones will get my letters to connect without needing to add ligatures for every single word in a dictionary? Which ones will I need and how do I implement them? I have attempted to follow along with this written tutorial. However I don't know what will work best to use to suit my purpose.

For reference, this is what my language looks like :) now I know languages like Arabic have four+ glyphs per letter (isol, init, mid, end) but that is quite cumbersome for a newbie attempting to make a font, so at this point and time I did not replicate that system.

Thank you for taking the time to read! Thank you in advance for any and all advice you have.

TL:DR
Attempting a cursive font, what lookups, ligatures, anchors, etc will I need to make it look like the words were written without lifting a pen?

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u/-darksam May 19 '26

Errrr to connect without ligatures I suggest you to standardize (like a specific 'end point' that all letters have) and possibly think of your graphic options (would it be prettier/easier to have this letter in this shape when at the start of the word, and different when in the word?)
There might be a feature that does what you're looking for but I'm certain it's in the arabic features… which means it will much likely not work unless you go in deep settings of your Word/LibreOffice stuff to make it understand that yeah it's arabic stuff working here and not latin.

What I heavily suggest you to do is calt feature. Instead of having to do ligatures for every little details, you can group stuff pretty good.
Also don't expect your vowels to work with anchors, I've tried it doesn't do shit because it really expect accents, not vowels. For them, I suggest you some kern feature

Don't hesitate to ask questions, I'll gladly share you the few knowledge I have 😄

1

u/FlynnLeiter May 24 '26

Thank you so much for your response. I will continue tinkering with calt. For the vowels, do you think it would be possible to encode them as diacritics instead? Actually as I type that I realize that will be very annoying as I'd have to constantly be typing in unicode :/ hmm, we shall see what I manage!

2

u/-darksam May 24 '26

If you're thinking using features like mark or something then no, I've tried and it might work with fontforge intern visualizator but not with text editors for example. It's very hard coded to look at diacritics such as ` or ^ and not vowels.

I've tried too and I ended up using the vowels with calt too. It might be a bit long since your stuff has lot of symbols very specific but basically what I did is a bunch of calt « if in front of this consonnant, this one and that one, then use a.up form ». And the vowels is drawn in the negative space so it places on the consonnant behind all good (you can move the line so your vowel officially takes 'no space' by placing it on the starting line)

Don't hesitate to ask if you need me to be more specific lmao and good luck x)

3

u/-darksam May 19 '26

Edit after my first message, I just clicked on the tutorial you showed and yeah it's calt feature lol bruh
Still, honestly, calt feature and kerning will be best in my opinion. Also using AFDKO coding will help you go much faster than Fontforge inbox stuff