Automatically add characters to a set

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_Bin_
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Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 11:09 pm

Automatically add characters to a set

Post by _Bin_ »

Hi,

I saw that people usually add not enough glyphs from a particular Language when building multi language support fonts. For example, they may forget to add ß to the German character set. I already know that fontcreator has the feature to tag character but as far as I know, we can't creat custom tag and add a PARTICULAR codepoint for ALL fonts. In short, I think it'd be fantastic if FontCreator next version has this feature:

1. We add a set of Character in a particular languages. For example, German.
2. We will be able to tag all of these new added characters under a PERMANENT Tag that we can custom its name, like German characters.
3. Then in the future if we add these codepoints characters to a font, they'll be automatically tagged under German.
4. We can add more custom tag like French, Italian etc...

I think this feature will be very helpful to those who need to add international languages to their fonts. I saw many fonts that say supports one language but in fact they're missing characters from that language.

Thank you for reading!
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Automatically add characters to a set

Post by Erwin Denissen »

I see the need for something like this, but I'm not sure if your solution is the best.

Maybe it would help if we added languages to the left treeview, so you can see how many characters are included in your fonts. This also makes it easy to complete a language similar to how you can complete a Unicode block right now.

We could also add a special "preferred character set" group, but I'm not sure about this.
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_Bin_
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Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 11:09 pm

Re: Automatically add characters to a set

Post by _Bin_ »

Thank you for the fast reply!

Yes that might help, but I think there must be more works for you developers to add a language block. Since you must go and find all of the characters for a particular languages and their codepoints, this, might get complicated too. Plus, there're just so many languages (include not-so-popular ones) that you can't include all of them in the left sidebar.

So I think my solution could be better since we can freely custom a character set. You could add some popular language block at the left sidebar, but I think it's still needed to support custom language blocks.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Automatically add characters to a set

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Please take a look at the existing Transform scripts for Eastern Europe and Vietnamese.
Eastern Europe.png
Eastern Europe.png (18.86 KiB) Viewed 6211 times
All you need to do is save your own preferred character sets as a Transform script, then run the script.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
PJMiller
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Re: Automatically add characters to a set

Post by PJMiller »

There is an interesting website at http://www.eki.ee/letter/ which tells you which letters are used in which languages.

My solution to this problem was just to add everything. Once you have added Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B and Greek then you have covered most if not all of the language needs of a great many countries.
_Bin_
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Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2015 11:09 pm

Re: Automatically add characters to a set

Post by _Bin_ »

Oh thank you for the useful informations!

I kind of knew about the scripts, but the thing is, I want to edit specific languages in a font when I have completed it. Or maybe I need to fix group of characters of the fonts that I already made, I think it'll be more comfortable if we can tag characters permanently.
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