So I'm trying to create a cursive handwriting font, for children to trace & learn, and I've been studying up on how OTF fonts work (features/lookups all that fun stuff) to figure out the best way to accomplish this. I'm using FontForge, most likely with inkscape.
The main issue is that of the joins between letters, to make everything link nicely with everything else.
I've kinda progressed through 3 ideas. 1st was to use ligatures, which I quickly realised wouldn't work due to the need for basically every word in the dictionary to be its own separate symbol.
2nd is to have all the base characters as is, and use contextual substitutions to switch out alternate glyphs with the correct linking lines.
And 3rd, which is what I'm considering now is to do it all as programmatically/modularly as possible: That is, have a lower number of glyphs acting as character "components" which are glued together as needed by different letters etc.
This ensures complete consistency between similar letters, and lets me edit a group like: 'a' 'd' 'g' 'q' by only editing the basic common circle, which all of them use. I've drawn a crude image to demonstrate this.
In this case the script would look something like:
sub a' by base_1 stem_a
sub d' by base_1 stem_d
sub d' by base_1 stem_g
etc
or even:
sub a' by base_1 stem_a join_a_1
sub d' by base_1 stem_d join_d_1
sub d' by base_1 stem_g join_g_1
etc shown in next pic
As far as I can evaluate, 2 is entirely robust, but might be a bit more tedius with drawing, and 3 is probably a bit harder to code and I'm not completely certain how to actually kern it as it uses so many glyphs in combination, but it'd much simpler on the drawing side, and especially easier glyph editing. I'm also worried about programs supporting no.3, it's much more heavily scripted and I'm not sure how that's handled by different programs.
Any thoughts?