Hello everyone,

I was wondering if OpenType features (as described here) are supported in Inkscape.

As I understand, such glyph-substitution features are not supported in Inkscape right now (googling and searching the forums provided no significant results). If the support is there, I would appreciate if someone could enlighten me on using it. If not, then does anybody here know about any plans for incorporating OpenType features in Inkscape?

Thanks.

Hi, I'll do my best to explain. If I'm wrong and any developer happens to be around to tell me that, I'll be glad

Inkscape relies on GTK+ toolkit which uses Pango for dealing with fonts, including advanced features. Recent versions of Pango now have an advanced OpenType shaper (a mechanism of building complex glyphs, doing contextual substitutions and other opentype functions) that supports more opentype functions and more complex scripts. However to the best of my knowledge Inkscape does not make any advanced use of that shaper, you only get default niceties like "ff", "fl" and "ffl" ligatures.

Obviously this has to be fixed one way or another. With 0.49 more objects will be rendered via Cairo (a 2D vector graphics library) which also makes use of Pango. This could be a good reason to look into advanced OpenType support.

Ah. Thanks, prokoudine.

I guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope that the developers do look into supporting advanced OpenType features when switching to Cairo.