

Whether you want your typeface to change the sequence of f|f|i into the appropriate ligature or want to use old-style figures instead of tabular, you’ll need to add features to your font - glyph substitution definitions - to make it happen.

Simply adding a glyph with a ligature to your font doesn’t mean the program you’re using knows when or how to apply it. With these many sets of glyphs integrated in a single font, we are faced with the challenge of including definitions instructing the applications we're using when to show which glyph. We now design and produce OpenType fonts which can consist of thousands of characters - additional ligatures, various figure sets, small caps, stylistic alternates, … - referred to as glyphs. The Type1 format where 256 characters are assigned to keys on our keyboard, is becoming a thing of the past.
