Problem with spaces in PSCS2

jordymacsmom · Post by **jordymacsmom** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 3:59 am

I have just finished my first font, and everything is working perfectly except that the spaces are showing up as question marks in Photoshop CS2. The font work perfectly in Word, so I don't think it's the way I have it set up. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

William · Post by **William** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 6:49 am

I have not met this problem before and I do not have Photoshop CS2.

I wonder if you could please download copies of the following two fonts which I produced, install them and try them out using Photoshop CS2 and then post your results in a reply to this post please.

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

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

The fonts are different one from the other in that Chronicle Text (in CHRONTXT.TTF) has a full set of the typographic spaces from U+2000 to U+200B whereas Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady (in SONNETRL.TTF) has none of those typographic spaces.

I am wondering whether Photoshop CS2 might be using typographic spacing and showing question marks because your font does not include glyphs for the typographic space characters. If so, the test using the Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady font should show the question marks as did your font and the test using the Chronicle Text font should not show the question marks. If that happens then we would know which glyphs might need adding into your font. If something else happens then we would know that it was not that possible cause and maybe obtain a clue to something else that might be happening.

However, if Photoshop CS2 is behaving in that manner it might be because an option to use typographic spacing is set somewhere in the program options. If that were to be the situation then it might then be possible to turn it off, yet if it is provided it might be better to add the typographic spacing glyphs to your font so that you would then have the advantages of using typographic spacing.

There is some information about the typographic spacing characters in the following document.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf

It and various other charts are available from the following page.

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

In passing I mention that the page for the charts for scripts is as follows.

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

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

1 March 2008

William · Post by **William** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 8:59 am

I have found some more information about the various space characters in Unicode. The information is within pages 11 and 12 of the following pdf document. The hardcopy page numbers are 205 and 206.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch06.pdf

William Overington

1 March 2008

jordymacsmom · Post by **jordymacsmom** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 12:57 pm

William, thanks for your information. I tried both of your fonts, and they both work fine in PSCS2. Spaces are spaces, and not a question mark! I will take a look at the other informtaion you posted and see if I can figure out where I went wrong...

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 2:21 pm

I checked the font.

The problem with the font is that the space character has no mappings on the Microsoft Unicode BMP platform. I don't know how you managed to remove them. Perhaps you deleted the space glyph by mistake then added it back in manually. If you created your new font in FontCreator the correct mappings would be there.

: Space Mappings.png (17.58 KiB) Viewed 4996 times

You also need to add similar mappings for the Unicode platform.
To edit the mappings, select the space glyph and press Alter Enter to open the glyph properties dialogue shown above. Enter the values 32, then 160 for each Platform, and click on Add to add them.

The safest and easiest route to add back a missing character is from the Insert Character dialogue. That will add the correct mappings for any platforms in the current font. However, it won't add the mappings for non-breaking space.

A font can have two separate glyphs for space and non-breaking space, or both mappings can be mapped to one glyph. In most cases they will need to have the same advanced width. I don't know of any advantage of having separate glyphs, but my fonts usually contain two separate glyphs.

You will need to set the advance width for the space glyph added via Insert Character. The recommended width for a space is about 1/4th of an em or 512 funits. The default for new fonts is 508 funits.

If you add a new glyph, its advance width will be the average character width for the font (found on Format, Settings, Ranges), which in most cases will be too wide for a space glyph.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 2:56 pm

William,

I notice that you nearly always ask people to download your fonts, whether or not it is relevant to the question asked. Then you add numerous links to read technical documentation.

People don't need to download your fonts. They already have plenty of fonts installed in their computers that will work fine in Photoshop.

If you don't know the solution to a question, it is better not to post a whole lot of irrelevant information. Though they may well learn something useful in the process, it really is not what they need to know at the moment. For someone new to font creation, it may make the learning curve seem very steep.

First try to diagnose the problem, then recommend a suitable solution.

William · Post by **William** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 9:25 am

The following thread might be of some help in relation to this problem.

viewtopic.php?t=1439

In the fifth post in the thread, being my post dated in its header as Sat Jun 17, 2006 7:41 am, though I did update it later that day, is the following.

I used a technique myself in a similar yet different situation recently to recover a font. It was fiddly yet worked. I made a copy of the original, then opened it. I then deleted all of the glyphs. I then started a new font and selected all of the glyphs and then copied them onto the clipboard and then did a paste special into the copy of the original. This gave me a font with empty glyphs all properly mapped, yet the metrics for ascenders and descenders were the same as in the original font. I then opened the original font and then copied the glyphs and pasted them (not a paste special) into the correct places in the new font. However, that was using my font http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/EUTOARCH.TTF which was known to be a working font with, as far as I am aware, everything in order. Is it right to recommend that technique for the font in this thread as it is not a working font? Would it be better to suggest writing down the metrics on a piece of paper and copying them manually to a new font? If so, is there anything else which would need copying across manually?

The point that I am seeking to make is that whilst it may well be possible to correct all of the mappings in the font, another possibility is to start a new empty font where all of the mappings are known to be correct and then to copy the artwork of the glyphs from the original font into the new font, thereby producing a font with known correct mappings together with copies of the original artwork.

The question arises as to why the font mentioned in the first post in this present thread worked in Word yet not in Photoshop. I remember reading somewhere once that Microsoft products read in fonts and seek to calculate various things in case the font is in error. So maybe Word was adding the missing space glyph into the font to help things move along smoothly.

William Overington

2 March 2008