Cursive handwritten font

[michael]

I am having a great time making fonts of my handwriting. It's a blast!

I have created a half dozen fonts of my handwriting and create letters for my mom which I snail-mail to her. I use InDesign so I am able to include photos and every paragraph gets a different font. The result is pretty cool, and she loves it. She gets letters like she used to, and I get points for being "the good one." LOL!

Seriously, you gotta do this.

Anyway, my next project will be doing a cursive font. It will be challenging, I'm sure, because I want all of the letters to hook together.

So my question isn't, "how do I do it?" I'm cool with reading the manual.

My question is which parts of the manual should I pay attention to?

I'm completely new to all this font stuff and don't know any of the terms, so I am having a hard time figuring out where to look for my answers.

Like, an 'a' after an 'a' hooks together differently than an 'a' after an 'o,' right?

how am I supposed to do this?

Thanks for any insights.

[Allan Murray]

Most 'connected' script fonts are just cleverly designed so that the connections are all in the same place.
Have a look at some of these for example, by opening them in Type 3.2 to see how they do it:
www.letteringlad.com/p/best-cursive-connected-fonts.html

This of course is not ideal, as in natural writing the connections are in different places. It is possible to do this using an OpenType feature called contextual substitution. In this case you may have several different forms of a character, and the one that is used depends on the character proceeding it (contextual). This is much more complex, and Type 3.2 does not yet support creating OpenType contextual features (coming soon).
blog.fonts.com/2011/05/connected-cursive-handwriting-fonts-part-1-in-context/