an advanced and accessible analog games typeface! · By
Most of Dicier's features need you to activate a font feature called 'discretionary ligatures'. The User Guide (currently v1.0) has instructions for doing this in Affinity Publisher (pg31), LibreOffice Writer (pg32), and MS Word (pg33).
If you're using another app, look up its Help docs or user forums for more info. Sometimes apps refer to them with other names, e.g. the Mac plain/rich text editor TextEdit calls them 'rare ligatures'.
Thanks for catching these! I've fixed the first one in my version, but the second is weird—it shows up fine in Affinity, but not in the exported .pdf, which is odd because the scripting for it works the same as PIECE_TOUT later on in that section, which displays right. I'll see if I can fix it today, and I'll publish the update after.
So I've traced it back to a bug with the affinity file or maybe publisher as a whole, where this one ligature doesn't display right unless it's used outside a table elsewhere in the file... so now one of the icons in the big demo in Chapter 1 is D6_TOUT. It works fine in shorter files and outside tables (so far) so I reckon it's some kinda pdf export issue (basically unsolvable from my end).
I've updated the files and I'll check this out again when I'm doing the v1.2 guide, but for now, this works.
When trying to use dice results with a d20 shape, the 20 on a d20 does not display correctly. The 20 displays to the left of the shape, rather than inside of it.
I've looked into this and unfortunately it looks like MS Publisher 2016 doesn't support OT features. The most direct evidence I found was a mod on the Microsoft support forums saying, in 2019, that the only MS Office app that supports OT features is Word.
I don't have MS Publisher, but you could try downloading Vollkorn, a font with a wide range of OT features, and see if that works. If it does, then I can look into what it does differently to Dicier (if anything).
I'm running into issues with the dicier pixel font not displaying dice other than D6s. I'm currently working in Microsoft Office 2016 and I updated to the latest Dicier versions just in case. Other dicier fonts are working in terms of showing the symbols, so I know I've at least enabled the ligatures properly.
In the screenshot below I've typed the following in both Dicier Flat-Heavy and Dicier Pixel.
ANY_ON_D6
0_ON_D4
1_ON_D4
2_ON_D4
3_ON_D4
4_ON_D4
ANY_ON_D4
You can see the triangles are showing up in one but not the other even though the text is the same. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
The results codes use kerning to combine two separate icons (the number or wildcard and the die shape). If you have OpenType kerning active (might be in the same menu as other OT features in Word) then they'll overlap. If you don't, then they'll appear side by side. They should all be consistent, all appearing either on the dice or before them.
So, I just posted that I thought that fixed it. And it does. A little. It fixes D6s. It doesn't seem to fix D10s or 8s. Or 4s.
It looks it applies Kerning to font size X and above, minimum is size 8. For the record, I tried increasing the size and it didn't affect the success/failure. Sorry.
(This explains why I thought I had tried it before without success, but I just didn't try all the permutations. In good news, testing has confirmed that you can apply font settings retroactively on the codes which wasn't explicit in the guidance.)
Each set of combination codes only works up to the maximum number of sides on that die (except d6), so 6_ON_D4 (like in your screenshot) will display side-by-side instead of overlapping like 1 to 4_ON_D4. However, as long as the numbers are within what you could roll on each die, the kerning should work.
0. I chose a bad example for the screenshot but I tried most dice and different numbers.
1: v5_1_3
2. I thought they had, but it seems not. Just D6 as the numbers.
3. Just D6 as before.
4. Word 2019, Win10, all updated.
5. Not at present, and TBH I think I'm going to consider this a sad write-off for now. I have spent quite a lot of spoons so far, which I don't regret, but I have limits. Hopefully having the conversation here will help others later.
One way would be to:
In order to access all versions of Dicier in Inkscape you'll need to install the 'LibreOffice' font files, because the two apps handle fonts the same way.
If you're using the advanced features (like the stylistic sets or character variants) then you'll also need to go to the 'Features' tab of the 'Text and Font' area in Inkscape. This may take a little while to load (maybe 10s) due to the number of OpenType features in Dicier. In that tab you'll find most of the advanced features under 'Feature Settings', plus discretionary ligatures under 'Ligatures' and slashed zero under 'Numeric'.
Hi!
Firstly, thank you for making such an amazing font. It’s so useful and I’ve used it in a few projects already. :D
I have a question. Is there some way to address this issue with the font? (Please see attached image.)
I want to have a highlight (Decoration, in Affinity Publisher) behind my text so that it obscures art behind it (in this case, obscuring part of a horizontal line). I can achieve the correct effect by adjusting the “Relative to” of the Decoration to “Ascent”, but is there something to do to adjust it for “Cap Height” without having to adjust the Top Indent? At the very least, this is an interesting (yet inconvenient for me in this situation) aspect for the interpretation of the font in the program, and at the most an awkward annoyance because all the font styles that need this style must all be adjusted accordingly.
I’d love your insight into this.
Thank you!
Yeah, it looks like this is due to Publisher (annoyingly, in this case) re-interpreting font metrics from the font curve data rather than using the actual metrics in the font file. The metrics in the file put the cap height and x-height at just below the top of the dice; looks like Publisher's taking the cap height from the height of the guide-letters instead (which isn't in the metrics at all). Compare the height of the guide-letter A to the lower-right pip of the 3-pip die in this image:
The top of the A is pretty much where the highlight stops in your example.
There's a simpler way of making a background for text, though: by using the 'Highlight' option under the 'Colour and Decorations' tab in the 'Character' section of the Edit Text Style menu. This option automatically uses the (app's interpretation of the) ascender height.
As for your current situation, you might be better served by making a single style that has the decoration/highlight and any other shared features that all these styles have, then making the individual styles be based on that style, so you can control the shared features in a single place.
Hi! I’m trying to use Dicier-Dark on web and the only symbols that are displaying correctly are the ones in the documentation. Dice in the format X_ON_Y are displaying as solids. I’m using v1.5.4 but I don’t know if those symbols are supported or if I should turn on a different feature for dicier.
Thanks!
This is an issue with Dicier Dark versions. Basically, Dicier does the X_ON_DY glyphs by overlapping two glyphs ("X_ON_" and "DY"). That works fine for the fonts where the dice shapes are outlines, but in the Dark fonts the dice shapes are solid/filled, so the font just layers a black number on a black shape.
If you're dead-set on using those exact codes then there's no easy fix (you could probably wrangle something with CSS given your situation), but if you just want the icons then use the polyhedral dice font features specified in the user guide.
Try switching on kerning (which may be listed as "OpenType kerning" in Word). Dicier uses this to make the X_ON_DY parts overlap with each other.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's been slowly deprecating OpenType feature support in MS Office (now only a subset of features work, only in limited ways, only in Word). See this previous issue. This may not be fixable in current MS Word.
My plan for fixing this is still in the planning stages and basically involves letting people choose their own codes, which should remove the need for almost all the OT features used in Dicier, which should make it more robust in different apps. I don't have a solid timeline for when this'll be implemented, though.
