Open 6 and 9 as tabular figures

[wesuweber]

Describe the bug
I created a customized version from Inter version 4.1 with open 6 and open 9 as "locked" features with the OpenType Feature Freezer. If I choose tabular figures in InDesign, the open 6 and open 9 don't have the right proportions to be in line with the other tabular figures.

Environment

• OS: Mac OS 15.3.2
• App that renders the font: InDesign 20.2
• Version of font: 4.1

[kenmcd]

This is a limitation of OpenType Feature Freezer.
See this note in the frontpage readme:

Note: This tool actually remaps the cmap table of the font by applying the specified GSUB features. It will not work for substitutions where neither glyph has any cmap entries. Only single and alternate substitutions are supported.

This applies to what you are trying to do with Inter.

Use FontFreeze instead.
FontFreeze works differently and can do what you want.
Repo is here: https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/fontfreeze
Online tool is here: https://mutsuntsai.github.io/fontfreeze/

I just tested the online tool by enabling cv03, cv04, and tnum.
This is the result: Inter-Regular_freeze.ttf.zip
Did not test this font.
Just took a quick look to confirm that the desired figures are there.

[wesuweber]

Thanks for the solution – much appreciated! Your Version of the Font has the tabular figures as default now, what I wanted to do is have the open 6 and open 9 as default and the tabular figures as a selectable OpenType option – but also with the correct tabular version of the open 6 and open 9.

Font Freeze created a much better result that OpenType Feature Freezer – still when I activate the open 6 and open 9 as default and i switch to tabular figures the standard 9 and 6 are displayed (although in their tabular version this time).

[kenmcd]

The "freeze" tools are designed to make features the default, and do not affect alternates of these defaults - which is what you are trying to do. The only way to do this is to actually swap the glyphs for the features by editing the font.

Re-read your initial post above, saw you are using InDesign, and I realized that you are trying to work-around InDesign's lack of support for Character Variants cvNN.
There is a free ID plug-in which does enable selecting Character Variants.
Here: https://github.com/RolandDreger/open-type-features
But IIRC it cannot support cvNN in styles.
Think it as to be manually applied.

ID does support the Access All Alternates (aalt) feature.
That is the characters available in that pop-up box when you right-click after selecting a character.
And aalt is also in the OpenType features panel (or whatever it is called in ID).
You should be able create to a character style and select the alternate glyphs from the All Alternates feature.

This may even work with the original fonts.
That way future updates will also work.

[wesuweber]

Thank you, I will give the plug-in a try! In the end I have to find a way for multiple users of different skill levels to always use the right character variants of the font, so maybe creating solid InDesign-Templates with the character variants already preselected in the paragraph formats might be the safest way.