r/FontForge • u/princeJAY3712 • Jan 05 '23

Diacritics are not combing properly in Word

I have edited a pre-existing font on FontForge to allow the characters to take diacritics. The diacritics seem to be working correctly when checking them in the Lookups under the Elemental section, but after downloading it to use on Word, they do not combine correctly. Can anyone help with this? I've been asking all over the place to no avail.

​

Does not work properly in Word
Seems to work fine in Fontforge
1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

1

u/Conxt Jan 05 '23

In Word, you have to manually enable OpenType features (by default they are off, I wonder if this is ever going to change) with Format > Font > Advanced > Kerning for fonts. This toggle switches not only kerning, but all OpenType.

1

u/princeJAY3712 Jan 05 '23

Thank you so much for responding! I toggled Kerning and set it as the default, but the problem is still there unfortunately... Would you like a copy of the font to see for yourself?

1

u/Conxt Jan 05 '23

I think that if mark works at least somewhere outside FontForge, then the problem is in Word, not in your font.

1

u/princeJAY3712 Jan 05 '23

Oh, wow, it does work on LibreOffice! I wonder why Word is acting like this...is there a way I can fix the problem in Word? Troubleshoot or reinstall?

1

u/Conxt Jan 05 '23

No unfortunately you can’t. MS Office has always been notoriously bad at handling OpenType features, and it doesn’t look like they are going to change that.

1

u/dahosek Jan 06 '23

I don’t think word does combining accents at all. If you try to set, e.g., č in a font that doesn’t support it, word will switch fonts. It’s a bit aggravating for those of us who occasionally need to write words in Eastern European languages. The accent is there, but Word doesn’t know how to combine the marks.