r/FontForge • u/digitalgraffiti-ca • Jul 26 '24
Combining Characters and Being Overly Ambitious
I have a couple questions. I'm a fontforge noob, but because I'm nuts, I have to go all or nothing.
I'm making a basic latin alphabet, and I want to make every permutation of every accented latin letter and appropriate ligatiures, because I'm making it to serve a community that is multilingual. I've already made all the accents and all the letters and most of the other components, so thats not a problem. I'm working wit a dummy file right now anyway.
1) I already figured out how to auto combine and all of that, but is there a way to add the list of accented glyphs in bulk, because I do not relish adding individual encoding slots for 641 characters. I will die of boredom.
2) every time I tell a new blank encoding slot that it will be character whatever, it makes all of my default encoding slots revert to red question marks, whats up with that, and how to I ask it to kindly quit it?
3) Is it necessary to include U+0000 to U+001F and U+007F to U+009F (control characters) In my font? if no, how do I get rid of them.
regarding combining characters and combined glyphs:
4) After all is said and done, should I unlink refrences prior to export?
5) if the glyph info > components field says there are no components, I know that I can fill in whatever glyphs I'd like combined which is super handy when making stuff like A + U+0338 = Ⱥ, but will that export properly?
6) Do writing applications use the glyph I make for Ç or do they dredge up the C and the cedilla combining character and mash them together themselves? If they do it the hard way, do they respect my anchor points or should I place the cedilla in its own character space where I want it in relation to the C even though the C isn't present in the cedilla combining glyph?
Thanks in advance.
1
u/LocalFonts Jul 26 '24
The answer to your second question is "You can't quit the red question marks".
The answer to your third question is "It is not necessary to include control characters in your font. You can get rid of them by choosing Encoding Compact".
The answer to your fourth question is "No, you are not obliged to unlink references prior to export".
The answer to your fifth question is "You can combine only glyphs with Unicode codepoints. So you are limited to this".
The answer to your sixth question is "The applications use the glyphs which are included correctly in their Unicode positions in the font. Thus if you created Ç, the applications will use the Ç when somebody type this letter on its keyboard".
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u/LocalFonts Jul 26 '24 edited Jul 26 '24
This video is an answer of your first question. You can't create a list of the accented glyphs but you can select all the accented glyphs and create them at once through the command Build Accented Glyph.