Help with Open Type Designer

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PJMiller
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by PJMiller »

Leon Gauthier wrote:FYI: the only accented vowel missing from the Unicode is the short (breve) Y and y
These characters are in the MUFI standard at codepoints $E776 and $E376 so if you are going to add them then these are the codepoints to use, alternatively you could get a MUFI compliant font like Junicode which is free.
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Leon Gauthier wrote:
Erwin Denissen wrote:Some other issue arises with your custom mark highmacron as it mapped to a character in the private use area. So I suspect the layout engine will not process the Latin character along with this mark in the same sequence. I think the string of characters is broken in parts, so they will never work together.
What is this, Catch-22? I put all of those non-Unicode glyphs in the private use area because they are not in the Unicode. :lol:
BTW, thanks for the interesting and informative links ... is that Volt GUI as crappy as it looks? I downloaded it but I am not sure that I want to jump down another rabbit hole just now. :roll:
I think it wil work just fine as long as both base and mark glyphs are mapped to the PUA.

I don't know why you would want to use VOLT as FontCreator supports all OpenType layout features, is more powerful, intuitive, and looks a lot better :wink:
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Erwin Denissen wrote:I think it will work just fine as long as both base and mark glyphs are mapped to the PUA.
I guess I am not understanding you here. I've provided examples of base glyphs not in the PUA combining just fine with mark glyphs in the PUA except, of course, for the positioning problem. (See poem with highbreve and highmacron) Have you any clues yet as to why my junk does not display properly in the WOFF test? BTW, I clicked a button on the web page offering help and I wound-up back on this forum with a missing topic ... you might want to check that.
PJMiller wrote:I know that .PDF only embeds the characters that are actually used and I think this is true for at least one of the programs which produce .epub format books so the size of the font might not be as big a problem as you think.
Yeah, that is a nice little trick Abobe does with their PDFs but it is not just a matter of size. I wish I could do the same because then I could use Microsoft fonts and many more. The problem with the epubs is that the embedded fonts can be extracted and installed on any other machine, violating their terms and conditions of use.... nevermind that modifying them would be another violation!
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Leon Gauthier wrote:I guess I am not understanding you here. I've provided examples of base glyphs not in the PUA combining just fine with mark glyphs in the PUA except, of course, for the positioning problem. (See poem with highbreve and highmacron) Have you any clues yet as to why my junk does not display properly in the WOFF test? BTW, I clicked a button on the web page offering help and I wound-up back on this forum with a missing topic ... you might want to check that.
I think FontCreator isn't as strict as other OpenType layout engines, so if something works in the preview of FontCreator, it is no guarantee it will work in Word, InDesign, or Firefox.

I think we've once cleaned-up the forum, and removed that topic. Maybe we should just point to the forum or remove that link.
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by PJMiller »

Leon Gauthier wrote: Yeah, that is a nice little trick Abobe does with their PDFs but it is not just a matter of size. I wish I could do the same because then I could use Microsoft fonts and many more. The problem with the epubs is that the embedded fonts can be extracted and installed on any other machine, violating their terms and conditions of use.... nevermind that modifying them would be another violation!
You might want to take a look at Junicode, it is free under the SIL Open Font license and nobody would extract it because it's easier to just download it from the website (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/), but if they did it wouldn't be a violation. You can even modify it if you wish.

It also has the Y and y with a breve at codepoints $E776 and $E376.

It might be worth a look.
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Junicode has some interesting glyphs/characters and it is HUGE!
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Alfred »

PJMiller wrote:You might want to take a look at Junicode, it is free under the SIL Open Font license and nobody would extract it because it's easier to just download it from the website (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/), but if they did it wouldn't be a violation. You can even modify it if you wish.

It also has the Y and y with a breve at codepoints $E776 and $E376.

It might be worth a look.
Junicode also has the Y and y with a breve at codepoints $F140 and $F141, respectively. I've no idea why they're duplicated.
Leon Gauthier wrote:Junicode has some interesting glyphs/characters and it is HUGE!
Junicode has fewer than 3300 glyphs, whereas Quivira has more than 10400, but I could only find Ybreve, not ybreve, in Quivira when I looked just now.
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Leon Gauthier
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

OK, here is another stupid question:
Are composites also an Open Type "feature"?
(as I work with this, I am thinking that composites are a FC "feature" and when a font is exported, simple, discrete characters are created)
Since I cannot even stack combining glyphs properly without OT, I've concluded that creating discrete characters is my only recourse.
Sample with OT positioning:
Accented vowels OT.png
Accented vowels OT.png (6.37 KiB) Viewed 6474 times
Sample without OT adjustments:
Accented vowels.png
Accented vowels.png (6.51 KiB) Viewed 6474 times
I am so bummed that apparently there is little to no universal support for OT, particularly in the realm of ereaders.
Now I'm looking to create at least 48 more characters in the PUA, $E000-$E10B and $F100 to ????

PS Not that I can use it now but, it would be helpful if the Open Type Designer also showed the WinAscent line :)
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Leon Gauthier wrote:Are composites also an Open Type "feature"?
No. Any application should be able to display Composites without any OT support at all.
Leon Gauthier wrote:Not that I can use it now but, it would be helpful if the Open Type Designer also showed the WinAscent line :)
I never needed it because I only ever use horizontal positioning, but I can see that it would be useful for vertical positioning of marks.

There's an icon at top right of the OpenType Designer window where you can change various settings, but the WinAscent WinDescent are not included.
Opentype Designer Settings.png
Opentype Designer Settings.png (6.75 KiB) Viewed 6471 times
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by PJMiller »

Alfred wrote: Junicode has fewer than 3300 glyphs, whereas Quivira has more than 10400, but I could only find Ybreve, not ybreve, in Quivira when I looked just now.
It should be noted that ths size of a font increases more for simple glyphs than for composite glyphs, unless they are very very simple. Simple glyphs take up more bytes than composites. So the number of glyphs in a font is not the whole story.

As a general point from this forum thread I would say that the documentation for Open Type Designer and what is possible using it needs to be more comprehensive.
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

PJMiller wrote:As a general point from this forum thread I would say that the documentation for Open Type Designer and what is possible using it needs to be more comprehensive.
You have said this before in this thread, but it's not a wise use of Erwin's time to write a book on how to use OpenType features. Erwin should use his time to make the existing features easier to use and add improvement, fix bugs, etc.

Writing comprehensive help files is a waste of time. You only have to look at any support forum to realise that most people don't read them, or cannot find the information that they need, or did not understand what they read. The FontCreator manual should just explain the mechanics of using the software, and not a lot more. OpenType design is a complex topic.

Everything in my tutorials is self-taught, and is by no means authoritative. I am just a long-term FontCreator user and an amateur font designer. I barely mention things that are beyond my knowledge such as using anchors or importing VOLT scripts.

If you want to learn about OpenType Features and how best to design them, follow Typophile on Twitter or do some searching and online reading.
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Leon Gauthier
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Alfred wrote:
PJMiller wrote:It also has the Y and y with a breve at codepoints $E776 and $E376.
Junicode also has the Y and y with a breve at codepoints $F140 and $F141, respectively. I've no idea why they're duplicated.
As I understand it, all of those locations are in the Private Use Area so they are “not protected”. In other words, if a user chooses to change the font used by a document which included those Y characters, there is no guarantee that those Y characters (or any character for that matter) will be displayed. So, once I determined that there are no Unicode points for the Ybreves, I put them in the PUA along with my 60 “new” vowel forms and 15 “special glyphs”, avoiding those areas which Font Creator itself uses.

Obviously, I could not use those other Ybreves, they did not match the styling of the glyphs in my font, so I created them along with all of the other new forms. The part I missed is how to create them as composites. Since I needed to get on with this project, I did not take the time to figure out what I missed … the manual did not make the process clear enough for me.

I will say, however, that creating these characters and glyphs was really easy and simple (even fun I might say) and Font Creator's various ways of organizing, sorting, the glyphs was indispensable in the process.

I have already bemoaned the fact that the Open Type Designer does not display the WinAscent line but my major irritation is with the numeric input boxes which insist on containing a zero even when you click to enter a value!!! You must pay attention or you windup with a value 10x greater than what you typed … deleting this extra zero is a real pain in the ass. (some bright fellow here will likely tell me how to “get around this” and I'll look the fool once again).
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

  1. Y breve and y breve don't exist in Unicode as far as I can tell. What you see in Junicode is Cyrillic Short u $040E and $045E. The latter uses lowercase y as a fall-back glyph in CompositeData.xml, which will generate y breve lowercase. The former needs a different design to Capital Y, so lacks a fall-back glyph. (See screen shots below)
    Cyrillic Short u.png
    Cyrillic Short u.png (25.31 KiB) Viewed 6447 times
    Cyrillic letter u.png
    Cyrillic letter u.png (11.7 KiB) Viewed 6447 times
  2. For the XAdvance you don't need to enter values. Just use the shortcuts in the Pair Adjustment List (Left = -10 funits, Shift+Left = 100 Funits, Ctrl+Left = 1 funit)
  3. For the other values (I think you're using the vertical values) use the Tab key to move between fields to select the zeros, or use the Access Keys to select the fields, e.g. Alt+Y to select the YAdvance.
  4. To create composites for glyphs where there are no values defined in CompositeData.xml, use the Insert Glyph Member icon on the Toolbar to insert the Y, then the modifier letter breve accent
  5. Or, copy one or more glyphs in the Glyph Overview, open the Glyph Edit window, and paste them.
If you need to do it for lots of fonts, it's worth editing CompositeData.xml or I can do it for you if you show me what's needed.
Entering Values.png
Entering Values.png (9.06 KiB) Viewed 6450 times
Insert Composite Glyph Member.png
Insert Composite Glyph Member.png (26.13 KiB) Viewed 6450 times
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Leon Gauthier
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

From the manual:
Create composite glyphs
You can create a composite glyph when you are editing an empty glyph in a
Glyph Edit window. To add a composite glyph member select Glyph from the
Insert menu. To add one or more glyphs as composite glyph members first
copy glyphs from the Font Overview window and then paste them into a Glyph
Edit
window that contains an empty glyph or a composite glyph.

(Er, excuse me; what was that?)
My interpretation is “1st create new empty glyphs”
I first, added two empty glyphs using Insert Glyphs... after the selected glyph (y)

I then copied the “Y” and pasted into the first empty glyph in the Empty Glyphs group
The glyph 'disappears', having moved to the Unused group
Copied the “y” and pasted it into the second empty glyph in the Empty Glyphs group
The glyph 'disappears', having moved to the Unused group

Ah, I see my error now … Once I've created my two new glyphs by copying and pasting the Ys, the option to “Insert Glyph...” is grayed out because I copied the Ys into the empty glyphs.

The correct operation then is:
Create empty glyphs using Insert Glyphs...
Open an empty glyph in an edit window and use Insert Glyph... to copy glyphs into the window as composite components.
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Re: Help with Open Type Designer

Post by Leon Gauthier »

Thanks, Bhikkhu Pesala, you helped me in the past with adding Sanskrit transliteration characters to another font I was working with. In this case, I thought a) that such scripting only worked for creating valid Unicode members (wrong) b) the vertical line glyph I was adding extended beyond WinAscent so all of the uppercase letters needed trimming and c) I needed the practice so the manual method had a benefit. However, I think I'll try to implement the script if I really need to do the Italic as well.

FYI from the junicode font:
Ybreves $F140.png
Ybreves $F140.png (3.45 KiB) Viewed 6440 times
ybreve $E776.png
ybreve $E776.png (3.13 KiB) Viewed 6440 times
Ybreve $E376.png
Ybreve $E376.png (3.12 KiB) Viewed 6440 times
My Auro vowels:
Auro Vowels sm.png
Auro Vowels sm.png (19.65 KiB) Viewed 6440 times
As you can see, I am jamming the accent marks to the top of the character box in one case and placing a vertical line as pointer over normal accents and letters in the others.

What kind of trouble would I cause if I increased the WinAscent value to create more room for the vertical lines which serve as pointers? As you can see they barely show-up on the capitals. As it is in the document, I am using 130% proportional line spacing just for more pleasant reading. If I make the line height greater to allow for taller marks could I not then decrease the line spacing?
Last edited by Leon Gauthier on Thu Nov 03, 2016 11:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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