Adding new platforms / naming / mapping to existing fonts

[Nick]

I'm currently testing Font Creator 3.1 and I can't find an easy way to add a new platform, naming and mapping to an existing font...

The problem is this: We have a set of fonts that only have Mac platform information and we need to add Microsoft information to these fonts because certain MS applications act weird with these fonts.

While I can add a new platform, add a new language, manually copy every damn attribute over and then (particularly tedious) create a new mapping and manually every single glyph in the new platform / language, surely there must be an automatic way of doing this? I can't find an option to do this though

[Erwin Denissen]

Currently there is no such feature. You could try to copy and paste the glyphs into another font that does have correct Microsoft table data.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I understand the problem you are having, and think I have found an easy solution. Erwin's explanation was perhaps too brief, so I will explain in detail. This is what I did, and it seems to work.

I opened one font that had mapping data for Unicode Semantics 1.0
and another that did not. The aim being to copy the mapping data from one font to the other.

I selected a range of characters in the font with mapping data for Unicode Semantics 1.0 and copied them (Control C). I tried just A to ~, but I expect you could do the whole lot at once as long as the same characters exist in both fonts and in the same order.

I added the Unicode Semantics platform to the other font, which had only platforms for Macintosh and Microsoft Unicode.

I selected Paste Special from the Edit menu, and checked all the boxes to copy Glyph Metrics, Glyph Postscript, and Glyph Mappings, and to override any existing mappings.

Hey Presto. The new font had all the correctly mapping information from the other font.

HOWEVER - YOU HAVENT QUITE FINISHED YET

Now you have the right mapping data, but the wrong glyph outlines from a different font. I leave it to you to figure out how to copy the glyph outlines back from the original font into the edited version with the correct mappings. Please post a reply on the forum if it works.

I don't think it will be too difficult, but since I don't know what fonts you are working with, what character sets they have etc., I cannot tell what other problems you might encounter.