META-THREAD Arabic Ligatures for OpenType Font

[William]

The thread with the original question is as follows.

viewtopic.php?t=2465

I started to draft an answer as follows. I know almost nothing about Arabic typography so the help that I could provide is quite limited.

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You may not be able to do all that you want to do using FontCreator alone as FontCreator does not support OpenType glyph substitution at the time of writing this post. However, producing the glyph designs can be done using FontCreator.

... I have added 1400 glyphs in my font in Microsoft Symbol form but it displays only 220 glyphs in testing process of font.

A Microsoft Symbol font is not the thing to use. I think that a Microsoft Symbol font is only intended to use about 220 glyphs.

A Unicode font is what is needed.

However, it is possible to start a new Unicode font and then add some new cells to the Unicode font and then to copy and paste the artwork for the ligature glyphs which you have produced from the Microsoft Symbol font to the Unicode font.

I have no experience of working using "right to left direction" characters.

You may already know of the Unicode documents about Arabic Script.

However, I will mention them anyway in case you do not already know about them.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch08.pdf

That chapter and the other chapters are available from the following web page.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/

There are code charts on the following page.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

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I was wondering whether to mention the Unicode Private Use Area as using that and the Alt method with WordPad would at least allow the glyph to be displayed, which might be useful if the desired end result is to produce hardcopy prints locally or to produce graphics files.

I am wondering whether to refer to my Chronicle Text font which has lots of ligatures in the Unicode Private Use Area. Those are Latin ligatures and not Arabic ligatures. I am wondering whether studying a font with Latin ligatures in the Unicode Private Use Area might be useful in learning how to use the Unicode Private Use Area for Arabic ligatures: or would that cause confusion?

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CHRONTXT.TTF

It is a difficult balance trying to decide what would be useful to add into the original thread and what might cause confusion. Comments invited please.

William Overington

4 November 2008