preview panel in OpenType Designer

[בן של מלך]

A. When you press the up and down arrows on the keyboard while typing words into Freeview, all the words I wrote are lost and cannot be recovered, think that you have important cases that you are checking and typing them in Freeview to arrange them later, and you accidentally clicked the up arrow, out of habit that "up" takes you to the beginning paragraph" and then you find out that all the cases you found have been deleted, it takes a lot of time.
Maybe this is really the place to ask for an option to add notes in the OpenType Designer panel.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Preview text strings can be edited, added, or deleted in Tools, Options, Preview.

[בן של מלך]

I know that.
But there are words that you check while searching for lookups, all kinds of temporary cases that you have to correct, there's no point in saving them, and after you found all the cases, you accidentally clicked on up with the arrows, and all the words were deleted, didn't that happen to you?!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Didn't that happen to you?!

Yes, but it is the expected behaviour. Include all of your test cases in a single preview text string.

Multiple Test Case.png (25.97 KiB) Viewed 6115 times

[בן של מלך]

All in all, I would like to improve the software so that pressing the up and down arrows on the keyboard will not replace the preview text, but will move the cursor to the beginning or end of the paragraph.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

All in all, I would like to improve the software so that pressing the up and down arrows on the keyboard will not replace the preview text, but will move the cursor to the beginning or end of the paragraph.

That would not be an improvement. Up/Down cursor are used to select the previous/next preview text. Left/Right, Home/End are used to navigate the text string.

Saving all temporary strings would not be an improvement either; it would just lead to more clutter. If you need to save text strings, add them in Tools, Options, Preview. You do not need hundreds of strings; combine ten or so in each preview text string. Reorder them into logical groups if necessary by editing \Roaming\High-Logic\FontCreator\15.0\preview.txt in notepad.

You said that they are difficult to type for Hebrew, requiring AltGr combos, etc., so type them only once and save them for reuse.

[בן של מלך]

So what can I do?
Let's say you are working on a special handwriting, each letter has five forms depending on its position in the word, and while programming the OpenType features, you test all kinds of different situations, and you find that one form goes well with eight certain letters.
Before you add a class with the eight letters, you accidentally pressed an up arrow, and that's it, everything you did is lost.
It happens to me a lot, what would you do in such a case?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I already told you what I do. I add a custom preview text string that includes multiple different cases.

So create a preview string with each of the five forms with each of the eight letters.

You could also copy the string to the clipboard and paste it in a text file for reference. I have a text file with super/subscripts that I copy and paste into other applications because they are hard to insert using a character map.

¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹ ¹⁰¹¹¹²¹³¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹ ²⁰²¹²²²³²⁴²⁵²⁶²⁷²⁸²⁹ ³⁰³¹³²³³³⁴³⁵³⁶³⁷³⁸³⁹
⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷⁴⁸⁴⁹ ⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵⁵⁶⁵⁷⁵⁸⁵⁹