List of typographic features


State-of-the-art digital typographic systems have solved virtually all the demands of traditional typography and have expanded the possibilities with many new features. Three systems are in common use: OpenType, devised by Microsoft and Adobe, Apple's Apple Advanced Typography, and SIL's Graphite. The lists below provide information about OpenType and AAT features. Graphite does not have a fixed set of features; instead it provides a way for fonts to define their own features.

OpenType typographic features

The OpenType format defines a number of typographic features that a particular font may support. Some software, such as Adobe InDesign or recent versions of Lua/XeTeX, gives users control of these features, for example to enable fancy stylistic capital letters or to choose between ranging and non-ranging digits. Some web browsers also support OpenType features in accordance with the CSS Fonts Module Level 3 specification, which allows OpenType features to be set directly via the property, or indirectly by means of higher-level mechanisms.
The following tables list the features defined in version 1.8.1 of the OpenType specification. The codes in the "type" column are explained after the tables.
OpenType features may be applicable only to certain language scripts or specific languages, or in certain writing modes. The features are split into several tables accordingly.

Features primarily intended for or exclusively required by South-Asian alphasyllabaries (Indic/Brahmic)

Features primarily intended for or exclusively required by East-Asian tetragrams (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

Features primarily intended for or exclusively required by West-Asian (Semitic, Arabic) and other cursive scripts or fonts

Features intended for bicameral cased alphabets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc.)

Features depending on writing direction

Features intended for digits and math

Ligation and alternate forms features intended for all scripts

Positioning features intended for all scripts

Special features intended for all scripts

Legend of substitution and positioning codes

Below are listed the OpenType lookup table types, as used in the "type" column in the above tables. S stands for substitution, and P stands for positioning. Note that often a feature can be implemented by more than one type of table, and that sometimes the specification fails to explicitly indicate the table type.
abbrev.typedescription
S1GSUB 1simple substitution of one glyph with another
S2GSUB 2multiple substitution of one character by several glyphs
S3GSUB 3variant selection
S4GSUB 4ligatures
S5GSUB 5contextual substitution
S6GSUB 6chained contextual substitution
S7GSUB 7extension for GSUB tables past 64kB
S8GSUB 8reverse chained contextual substitution
P1GPOS 1positioning of single glyph
P2GPOS 2positioning of pair of glyphs
P3GPOS 3cursive attachment
P4GPOS 4positioning of mark glyphs relative to base
P5GPOS 5positioning of mark glyphs relative to ligature
P6GPOS 6positioning of mark glyphs relative to another mark glyph
P7GPOS 7contextual positioning
P8GPOS 8extended contextual positioning
P9GPOS 9extension for GPOS tables past 64kB

AAT typographic features

Features that take one value, mutual exclusive from the rest:
Features that take a number of values:
Binary features that can only be turned on: