From the course: Font Secrets: Elevate Your Typographic Game

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The how and why of glyph shifting

The how and why of glyph shifting

From the course: Font Secrets: Elevate Your Typographic Game

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The how and why of glyph shifting

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- [Instructor] Glyph shifting is definitely one of the more obscure OpenType features, but once you see it, you'll want to use it. If your font has case-sensitive forms for brackets, braces, and hyphens, you can use them to adapt the position of the glyph relative to the baseline for a better fit with neighboring glyphs. And this is relevant because brackets and hyphens are typically optimized for lowercase letters, and consequently sit too low next to uppercase letters. So in this example, the type in black has been typed in all caps and glyph shifting doesn't work if you type with the Caps Lock on. Type it as upper and lowercase, or lowercase and then convert it to uppercase, and you can see that the hyphens are now sitting higher relative to the baseline. You can also apply the case-sensitive form using your type contextual controls.

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