Why aren't you using real Unicode encoding?
I helped to add dozens of medievalist characters. See
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UA720.pdf
   for instance.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Hello,

I am seeking tutorials on creating custom unicode encodings for medieval latin
fonts. I have a font which has 290 char slots but has a non-standard encoding. I
have created the names for each slot based on UNICODE key words. I was told I
should use PUA but where do I get the numbering for each slot and how would I
then access the chars via a Gui in CS4 suite? Feel free to call me 954-791-5226
anytime. Thanks for your help.

shalom, Andrew Meit

--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "johnroshell" <jg@...> wrote:
>
> Use Element > Transform (or command \ ), select "Basepoint" and "Scale
uniformly" then choose a percentage.
>
> I'd select one character and experiment to find the right percentage, then
Undo, select all of the characters and transform them at once.

John,

In the end this is what I did... I could not find a good way to do it in FontLab
(not any response from the FontLab forum on the query) but tried-and-true
Fontographer did the job just fine.

Michael

Use Element > Transform (or command \ ), select "Basepoint" and "Scale
uniformly" then choose a percentage.

I'd select one character and experiment to find the right percentage, then Undo,
select all of the characters and transform them at once.

John




--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "Michael Everson" <everson@...> wrote:
>
> I'm drawing a font in Fontographer, but processing it with FontLab. I have a
font metrics problem, and I am not sure what the right way to fix it is.
>
> The problem is that the font is way too small compared to other fonts.
http://www.evertype.com/fonts/syllabics/Allatuq-sizes-14-14-14.pdf shows my font
(the middle one, Allatuq) alongside two others.
http://www.evertype.com/fonts/syllabics/Allatuq-sizes-14-18-14.pdf shows the
three again, but Allatuq is now set at 18 point.
>
> How can I resize Allatuq correctly?
>

I'm drawing a font in Fontographer, but processing it with FontLab. I have a
font metrics problem, and I am not sure what the right way to fix it is.

The problem is that the font is way too small compared to other fonts.
http://www.evertype.com/fonts/syllabics/Allatuq-sizes-14-14-14.pdf shows my font
(the middle one, Allatuq) alongside two others.
http://www.evertype.com/fonts/syllabics/Allatuq-sizes-14-18-14.pdf shows the
three again, but Allatuq is now set at 18 point.

How can I resize Allatuq correctly?

I work exactly the same way!

I don't think I could draw in fontlab if my life depended on it. That program is
a
nightmare.

Would be nice if the fontlab guys added opentype and anti-aliased screen
rendering. Then
it would be perfect!

jg


----------------------------------------
John Roshell
The World's Greatest Comic Book Fonts!
http://www.ComicBookFonts.com
----------------------------------------


--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> I also use FontLab, to process the fonts, and sometimes for minor
> kinds of editing. But for major drawing, Fontographer's my mainstay.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>

I spoke yesterday with Gerry Leonidis whos runs the Type Design course
at Reading University for the last 10 years. His pupils first use
pencil and paper for 10 weeks then go on to Fontographer and before
they go eventually to Fontlab. This is precisely because of Fogs easy
to use interface.

and his pupils --- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, Fox Creek Printing
<dyegang@...> wrote:
>
> I've got FontLab--it's great, but Fontographer doesn't
> really exist, right? So there won't be improvements to
> that software--I thought that was the email's list of
> things needed (like making OpenType).
>
> --- Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:
>
> > On 14 Jan 2009, at 14:40, Fox Creek Printing wrote:
> > > Fontographer is gone. FontLab ate it up.
> > >
> > Not at all true! FontLab bought it. And they've made
> > an update
> > available (for Mac anyway) and I use it all the
> > time. I agree with
> > Gary... Fontographer's drawing tools are excellent.
> >
> > I also use FontLab, to process the fonts, and
> > sometimes for minor
> > kinds of editing. But for major drawing,
> > Fontographer's my mainstay.
> >
> > Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
> >
> >
>
>
> p: 864-233-8646
> www.foxcreekprinting.com
>

I've got FontLab--it's great, but Fontographer doesn't
really exist, right? So there won't be improvements to
that software--I thought that was the email's list of
things needed (like making OpenType).

--- Michael Everson <everson@...> wrote:

> On 14 Jan 2009, at 14:40, Fox Creek Printing wrote:
> > Fontographer is gone. FontLab ate it up.
> >
> Not at all true! FontLab bought it. And they've made
> an update
> available (for Mac anyway) and I use it all the
> time. I agree with
> Gary... Fontographer's drawing tools are excellent.
>
> I also use FontLab, to process the fonts, and
> sometimes for minor
> kinds of editing. But for major drawing,
> Fontographer's my mainstay.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com
>
>


p: 864-233-8646
www.foxcreekprinting.com

On 14 Jan 2009, at 14:40, Fox Creek Printing wrote:
> Fontographer is gone. FontLab ate it up.
>
Not at all true! FontLab bought it. And they've made an update
available (for Mac anyway) and I use it all the time. I agree with
Gary... Fontographer's drawing tools are excellent.

I also use FontLab, to process the fonts, and sometimes for minor
kinds of editing. But for major drawing, Fontographer's my mainstay.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

Fontographer is gone. FontLab ate it up.

--- grylonergan <gary.lonergan@...> wrote:

> I haven't used Fontographer in years but yesterday I
> opened an old font file in
> Fontographer 4 in Classic and did some drawing.
> Compared to illustrator and Fontlab its
> so intuitive and easy. Click for first point, click
> again (and drag if you want bezier handles)
> Apple M to merge points. Shift apple O to remove
> overlap (have you tried this in Fontlab)
>
> Most of you will know this but Fog needs now to
>
> 1 be able to generate Open type fonts
>
> 2 Have a proper screen render
>
> 3 Have the ability to import  pencil sketches at
> high resolution
>
> having said all that Matthew Carter still uses
> Fontographer 3.5
> and prefers to spend his money on a top range laser
> printer apparently
>
>


p: 864-233-8646
www.foxcreekprinting.com

I haven't used Fontographer in years but yesterday I opened an old font file in
Fontographer 4 in Classic and did some drawing. Compared to illustrator and
Fontlab its
so intuitive and easy. Click for first point, click again (and drag if you want
bezier handles)
Apple M to merge points. Shift apple O to remove overlap (have you tried this in
Fontlab)

Most of you will know this but Fog needs now to

1 be able to generate Open type fonts

2 Have a proper screen render

3 Have the ability to import  pencil sketches at high resolution

having said all that Matthew Carter still uses Fontographer 3.5
and prefers to spend his money on a top range laser printer apparently

One of the things that really bugs me is how the names list in Fontographer and
the names
list in FontLab have minor differences.

I always use Fontographer to draw my characters; then I process my fonts with
FontLab,
which sorts out some problems that Fontographer causes in modern operating
systems.

The disconnect between the names lists is annoying; whenever I open a font in
Fontlab
several characters are duplicated because of nameslist issues.

There are ways of editing the names list in Fontographer; I've been doing it for
years on the
Mac with ResEdit. I'm considering a serious review of Fog's names list to see if
I can fix my
own copy.

Has anyone else out there done similar work? Or noticed the problem?

It's usually right on top of the left sidebearing, in which case, click there
and drag to the
right to adjust it. Or it's way, way offscreen to the right, in which case
double-click the
letter to open the editing window, drag the bottom right corner of the window to
"resize to
fit", and it should be visible.

If all else fails, you can set the width of the character directly with Metrics
> Set Width

jg


--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "typeprof1" <typeprof1@...> wrote:
>
> Hey All,
> I am very new to Fontographer, so this may be a very elementary question. I
have been
using
> Chank Diesel's online font tutorial to get started. He suggests cutting and
pasting
several
> letters from Illustrator at one time to speed up  the process a bit. Sometimes
when I
click in
> the character slot and paste, the right side bearing line is missing. How do I
get it back?
>

Hey All,
I am very new to Fontographer, so this may be a very elementary question. I have
been using
Chank Diesel's online font tutorial to get started. He suggests cutting and
pasting several
letters from Illustrator at one time to speed up  the process a bit. Sometimes
when I click in
the character slot and paste, the right side bearing line is missing. How do I
get it back?

At 09:56 +0700 2008-03-07, Raymond Weisling wrote:

>Actually the lower 95 accessible characters are all used but 1, but
>in the code space above 128 only 38 are used. But the main problem is
>choosing an encoding so that on the Windows TT font nothing is lost,
>and so far I lose 5-10 glyphs.

Do you know which ones?

I suppose I'd need to see your Fog file.

>If I change the Mac encoding to Adobe
>Standard it may work, but then all of the Mac character codes and
>keyboard associations change, and we have hundreds of people using
>this font in existing documents, since 2000.

One option is to upgrade and replace the documents, but let's not go there now.

>This mail list seems very quiet. Is it always like this??

Pretty much. We don't have very many issues with Fog.

I do have some issues about the character names it contains.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

At 08:55 +0700 2008-03-04, Raymond Weisling wrote:

>The font was created using Macintosh encoding and has a bunch of
>zero-width symbols and very large ascender and descender values
>because many symbols reside above regular characters. (It is for
>notation of central Javanese music, which uses numbers 1-7, some with
>dots under or above for octave, plus much more.)

Interesting. I'd like to see it. I recently prepared a proposal to
encode Javanese script. When I was in Java we found that unlike the
Balinese they did not use a complex system of musical notation, but
rather on a number and dot system as you describe.

>In 1990 I had no Windows box so I created a Windows encoded TT font.
>But now I found out that quite a few glyphs vanished from that
>version due to the original chap who made it having relied on Mac
>keyboard shortcuts, when those characters are on the list of .notdef
>on Windows. In particular, a string of elevated numbers 1-7 using
>shift-opt-1 thru 7.

Do you have a list of all the glyphs and all the characters they
corresponded to?

>I'm trying to achieve three possibly mutually exclusive goals.
>
>1. Make a Windows TT font with these symbols.
>
>2. The Windows font should allow documents to be made and editable on
>Mac, and visa-versa.

There can be issues with older v. newer Mac OS.

>3. The original Mac font should not be changed, or else it will break
>many files in many people's archives.
>
>What is encouraging is that documentation done on the Mac, and
>Acrobat Distilled with embedded fonts, can be opened on Windows with
>100% perfection, nothing lost. Distiller knows what I want to know ;-)

The thing to do is to process your font in FontLab, I think.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

##### level-1 quote by johnroshell  (on) 04.03.08 (at) 16:49 +0000

>Hi, Raymond. Welcome aboard!
>
>>  1. Make a Windows TT font with these symbols.
>
>Pretty much everything you see on the keyboard is fair game for
>windows and macs. Are
>all of those characters used up in your font? I'm not a Windows
>user, but I think the upper
>and lowercase option-letters (minus i, e and u, which indicate
>accents to be placed over
>the next letter entered) should be safe.

Actually the lower 95 accessible characters are all used but 1, but
in the code space above 128 only 38 are used. But the main problem is
choosing an encoding so that on the Windows TT font nothing is lost,
and so far I lose 5-10 glyphs. If I change the Mac encoding to Adobe
Standard it may work, but then all of the Mac character codes and
keyboard associations change, and we have hundreds of people using
this font in existing documents, since 2000.

>
>>  2. The Windows font should allow documents to be made and editable on
>>  Mac, and visa-versa.
>
>Windows TTFs work in Mac OSX with no problem.

OK, but again, compatibility with old documents is an issue.

>
>>  3. The original Mac font should not be changed, or else it will break
>>  many files in many people's archives.
>
>Well, try leaving the characters in the original location as well as
>the new location, and
>give it a try. I'd be happy to install it on the Mac and try it out
>if you need a tester.

You mean place the same glyph in two slots? But then it will not
allow a document to be carried across platforms.

This mail list seems very quiet. Is it always like this??

Ray

--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, Raymond Weisling <rw-ee@...> wrote:
>

> I was going to lurk for a bit here, but it seems very quiet, so I'll
> pop up and awaken the crew...
>
> First, I use FOG 4.1.5 on an older Mac because the font stuff I do is
> just volunteer work, no income, labour of love, yada-yada. I'd *love*
> to get a newer FOG or whatever, but can't justify the cost.
>

Hi, Raymond. Welcome aboard!

> 1. Make a Windows TT font with these symbols.

Pretty much everything you see on the keyboard is fair game for windows and
macs. Are
all of those characters used up in your font? I'm not a Windows user, but I
think the upper
and lowercase option-letters (minus i, e and u, which indicate accents to be
placed over
the next letter entered) should be safe.


> 2. The Windows font should allow documents to be made and editable on
> Mac, and visa-versa.

Windows TTFs work in Mac OSX with no problem.

> 3. The original Mac font should not be changed, or else it will break
> many files in many people's archives.

Well, try leaving the characters in the original location as well as the new
location, and
give it a try. I'd be happy to install it on the Mac and try it out if you need
a tester.

JG

##### level-1 quote by Michael Everson  (on) 03.03.08 (at) 09:54 +0000

>From our newest member:
>
>  >I'm an engineer, have designed a few fonts over the past 12 years in
>>FOG 4.1.5, need help with updating an old custom Mac font for TT
>  >Windows, has glyphs in upper 128 space that are lost.
>

I was going to lurk for a bit here, but it seems very quiet, so I'll
pop up and awaken the crew...

First, I use FOG 4.1.5 on an older Mac because the font stuff I do is
just volunteer work, no income, labour of love, yada-yada. I'd *love*
to get a newer FOG or whatever, but can't justify the cost.

The font was created using Macintosh encoding and has a bunch of
zero-width symbols and very large ascender and descender values
because many symbols reside above regular characters. (It is for
notation of central Javanese music, which uses numbers 1-7, some with
dots under or above for octave, plus much more.)

In 1990 I had no Windows box so I created a Windows encoded TT font.
But now I found out that quite a few glyphs vanished from that
version due to the original chap who made it having relied on Mac
keyboard shortcuts, when those characters are on the list of .notdef
on Windows. In particular, a string of elevated numbers 1-7 using
shift-opt-1 thru 7.

I'm trying to achieve three possibly mutually exclusive goals.

1. Make a Windows TT font with these symbols.

2. The Windows font should allow documents to be made and editable on
Mac, and visa-versa.

3. The original Mac font should not be changed, or else it will break
many files in many people's archives.

What is encouraging is that documentation done on the Mac, and
Acrobat Distilled with embedded fonts, can be opened on Windows with
100% perfection, nothing lost. Distiller knows what I want to know ;-)

Any suggestions, crew?   TIA!

Raymond Weisling
from Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia

From our newest member:

>I'm and engineer, have designed a few fonts over
>the past 12 years in
>FOG 4.1.5, need help with updating an old custom Mac font for TT
>Windows, has glyphs in upper 128 space that are lost.


--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

At 05:24 -0800 2008-01-27, Adam Twardoch wrote:

>We don't currently have any immediate update plans for Fontographer
>4.7.3. The mappings that it includes are based on the old Adobe
>Glyph List as was defined back in 1996.

The glyph names in Fontographer are given internally in its STR#400.
It is not difficult to either edit this, or to leave it alone,
renumbering it as STR#401, and introducing a corrected

>FontLab Studio 5 and TypeTool 3 have the correct mappings.

Adam, I know FontLab is more focused o FontLab Studio than on
Fontographer, but there are at least some of us who use both. I
cannot draw in FontLab. Its interface is, well, just not something I
can use. I can draw splendidly and productively in Fontographer. Then
I use FontLab to process my fonts, and add OT tables, and so on. One
of the recurrant problems however is the lack of identity between the
encodings used. Every time I open a Mac Roman Fog-generated font, for
instance, the MIDDLE DOT is duplicated and the HYPHEN is triplicated,
both sets of characters marked out in red. This DOES affect
productivity.

It would not be difficult to sort this out. It would take a bit of
effort and care.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

I was one of the people who helped the Romanian Standards Body to add
0218, 0219, 021A, 021B to the standard. Let's review the argument.

015E, 015F, 0162, 0163 derived from the ISO/IEC 8859-2 series, where
they were intended to be used for Romanian. The diacritic was
mistakenly identified as a CEDILLA, although the CEDILLA shape is not
used in Romanian. In ISO/IEC 8859-9, the S-CEDILLA was also present,
for use in Turkish, where the CEDILLA shape is used.

When it got into the UCS, only S-CEDILLA and T-CEDILLA were encoded.
This causes problems when trying to write multilingual text in
Turkish and Romanian. So we added the new characters for Romanian.
(Turkish does not use T-CEDILLA, though some transliterations of
Arabic script do.)

The characters are not glyph variants of one another.

If you want to write Turkish or transliterated Arabic, you should use
015E, 015F, 0162, 0163. Note that all four of these decompose to S s
T t plus 0327 COMBINING CEDILLA.

If you want to write Romanian, you should use 0218, 0219, 021A, 021B.
Note that all four of these decompose to S s T t plus 0326 COMBINING
COMMA BELOW.

When I open Fontographer 4.7.3, and activate the "Windows Unicode
Glyph List" encoding, I find that there is no 015E and 015F; there is
instead in the expected position F6C1 and F6C2, "Scedilla" and
"scedilla". I find also that there is no 0162 and 0163, but in that
position there is 021A and 021B, "Tcommaaccent" and "tcommaaccent". I
*also* find further down in the file 0218, 0219, 021A, 021B, with the
names "Scommaaccent", "scommaaccent", "Tcommaaccent", and
"tcommaaccent".

So Fontographer 4.7.3 has:

F6C1 Scedilla
F6C2 scedilla
021A Tcommaaccent
021B tcommaaccent
0218 Scommaaccent
0219 scommaaccent
021A Tcommaaccent
021B tcommaaccent

So there are DUPLICATE character names, and something wrong with the
code positions. That can't be good. (I volunteer to help FontLab to
fix Fog here.) But when I open the Mac OS 9 Fontographer 4.1.3, I
find ONLY the first two, with  glyph names for these: I find:

015E Scedilla
015F scedilla
0162 Tcedilla -- DIFFERENT NAME from Fontographer 4.7.3
0163 tcedilla -- DIFFERENT NAME from Fontographer 4.7.3
-missing-
-missing-
-missing-
-missing-

When I open FontLab Studio, 4.7.3, I find the following glyph names
for these positions:

015E Scedilla
015F scedilla
0162 Tcommaaccent
0163 tcommaaccent
0218 Scommaaccent
0219 scommaaccent
021A uni021A
021B uni021B

Well, there is certainly a problem. What can we do about sorting it
out, Adam? I'll be happy to help.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com

Don't you have to add a character name? I find when I open a Fog-generated file
in FLStudio
002D and 2010 are both highlighted red. The way to fix that is to open the 2010
character
name, delete the 002D, then close the character name. The glyph will disappear
from 002D,
but you can just copy and paste it back. Reds gone.

--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "Robert_Schenk" <robert_schenk@...> wrote:
>
> Is anyone still here?
>
> After a very long time of not doing much with Fontographer, I recently
> was working on revising some fonts and I cannot get the hyphen to work
> correctly. It looks fine in the font while in Fontographer, but when I
> generate the font file, there is no hyphen when I use it in MS Word or
> in TextEdit. I am using Fontographer 4.7.3. Anyone ever have a similar
> problem?
>


This resulted from Microsoft "fixing" a bug in Word by renumbering the hyphen
character.
Nice of them, huh?

The hyphen in Fontographer is Unicode #00AD, and to work in Word, you need to
create a
duplicate character #002D.  Here's how:

1. go to Element > Font Info (command f)

2. set the number of characters to 257

3. Copy and paste your hyphen character into the new character.

4. Select the new character, and select Element > Selection Info (command i)

5. Enter "$002D" in the Unicode index field

That should do it! Let me know if not -- it's been a while since I did this, and
I may have
skipped a step.



> Also, what is the name of the program that lets FontLab read
> Fontographer files?
>

It's not really necessary -- just export Windows Postscript, then open the .PFB
in Fontlab.
As long as the .PFM is in the same folder, it will import the kerning and
everything.

jg

Hi,

I was annoyed by an extremely old bug yesterday ;-)
Cyril! Are you here?
When you paste wide artwork from e.g. FreeHand,
(a process that is *much* more accurate in FOG than in FontLab)
so wide that it extends in the gray area on the right,
you can still type command-A and move everything to the left,
but it is impossible to set the width of the character to something normal.
Whatever you type in the set width dialog, it complains.
It complains 12 years already. :-)
One workaround is to first set a point before pasting.

best, L

> > Also, what is the name of the program that lets FontLab read
> > Fontographer files?

http://www.fontlab.com/font-converter/foglamp/foglamp-specifications/

L.

--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "Robert_Schenk" <robert_schenk@...> wrote:
>
> Is anyone still here?

Yes!

> After a very long time of not doing much with Fontographer, I recently
> was working on revising some fonts and I cannot get the hyphen to work
> correctly. It looks fine in the font while in Fontographer, but when I
> generate the font file, there is no hyphen when I use it in MS Word or
> in TextEdit. I am using Fontographer 4.7.3. Anyone ever have a similar
> problem?

I always draw in Fontographer, but I process my fonts in Fontlab. There are
indeed some
problems with hyphens that come up there because of ancient naming issues. There
are
ways of hacking this within Fontographer but I've been so busy I just do it in
FL.

> Also, what is the name of the program that lets FontLab read
> Fontographer files?

I don't know; I never bought it because I prefer to draw in Fog and so I
generate from Fog
and then work on the suitcases I generate.

Is anyone still here?

After a very long time of not doing much with Fontographer, I recently
was working on revising some fonts and I cannot get the hyphen to work
correctly. It looks fine in the font while in Fontographer, but when I
generate the font file, there is no hyphen when I use it in MS Word or
in TextEdit. I am using Fontographer 4.7.3. Anyone ever have a similar
problem?

Also, what is the name of the program that lets FontLab read
Fontographer files?

R Schenk

I think this list is so quiet because Fontographer is such a great program, we
hardly ever have
trouble using it! :)

Contrast that with the FontLab list, which is constantly abuzz with questions
about "Python
scripting" and "class-based kerning" and other terms that seem to have more to
do with
programming computers than creating fonts. Why anyone prefers that program, I
will never
understand.

FOG RULES!

Sorry, just had my coffee. Will settle down now.

John

--- In fontographer@yahoogroups.com, "Michael Everson" <everson@...> wrote:
>
> This is a quiet list, but I thought I would just send a message out to see if
there were any
> bounces or anything. Also Cyril said he doesn't get mail... maybe that's just
because it's
> quiet. Cyril?
>

it works. seems the mail forwarding faults were sporadic.

best regards,
Cyril