Fill in space/hyphen/Joiner/separator glyphs? Add leading text 'justification' kerning?

[cmahte]

Can you add these space and space-like nonwhitespace glyphs?

Uni	Description	Note
0008	Backspace	(same as ZWSP)
034F	Combining Joiner	(same as ZWSP)
00AD	Soft hyphen	(same as a ZWSP)
2010	Hyphen	(same as a hyphen-minus)
2011	No-break hyphen	(same as a hyphen-minus)
2027	Hyphen point	(mid height dot)
2043	Hyphen bullet	(mid height dash about the same as a narrow space)
2000	En Quad
2001	Em Quad
200D	Zero width joiner
2060	Word joiner
2063	Invisible separator
2028	Line separator
2029	Paragraph separator
3000	Ideographic Space	(space that spans the same in X as the vertical leading, likely a little larger than em space.)
FEFF	Zero width no-break space
FFF9	Interlinear anchor
FFFA	Interlinear separator
FFFB	Interlinear terminator

In all cases, these glyphs provide special functions as described in the Unicode standard in apps if they are present in the font, and supported in the app. For example, the various hyphen characters are detected and possibly show up as alternatives in a layout engine.

I'm working through what it takes to make LibreOffice produce real text. And one of the big gaps between LO and Indesign is the lack of proper justified text mode with allowances for punctuation.

So, I'm studying implementing some negative tracking/kerning on punctuation. By this, I originally meant including a NWJ character in front of leading quotes and automatically detecting them in a script and kerning them back. This won't work at the end of text rows, but it will work for leading text.

Except that's exactly what the font does in the kern table. In order to 'track or kern before the starting margin, the kern needs to be on a non whitespace character. Which brings me to the list above, and that there are other whitespace functions that the font isn't aware of but apps have enabled, but deal poorly with missing glyphs.

[cmahte]

These represent Items in section 11, 16.1 and 16.3 in this document.

[CatharsisFonts]

Does the new commit fix this?

[cmahte]

That provides the glyphs. Thank you.

The last half of my request. In the Microsoft list of registered opentype features, they list the feature jalt for "justification alternates." The description of what justification alternates are for seems like it's similar enough and compatible with using that feature to throw directionally justified punctuation alternates in that feature that hang beyond the zero or end row, then setup larger than normal kerning for that alternate punctuation glyph to keep it appearing normal when it appears in the the text row. When it hits on the end of the row, it will appear optically aligned (simple punctuation extends beyond the boundary.)

However, jalt is listed as a 'cursive script' feature. That might actually be good, since using it in latin scripts won't automatically cause conflicts. However, I've never seen it used or any tables/alternates. I don't recommend this public wide release, but that's what I'm working toward right now. Unless you already know this won't work.

[cmahte]

Thank you.

[CatharsisFonts]

I don‘t know about JALT, and currently don‘t have the capacity to experiment with it. Feel free to do so yourself, though!