Trying to create a Mandaean font but failed

[lonewolf]

Dear All,

My greatest appreciation to this great forum.

I belong to the Mandaean religion and our religion has an old language very close to the language that Jesus Christ spoke in the “passion of the Christ” which is not available in the Unicode pages. I have been trying the last few weeks to create this font (using Font Creator) based on Arabic (it is a RTL language) and I managed to place our letters on an existing font and it worked, but I have 2 problems:

1. After placing all the letters I needed to create ligatures (substitution of two letters with a separate glyph) but failed. I have VOLT and Fontlab and was unsuccessful in creating the substitution.

2. I tried to create my own font based on Arabic but it didn’t work.

I tried to read through this forum and found many ideas that were helpful, and some that don’t work but in general now I became very confused and lost.

Therefore, I would highly appreciate any assistance regarding creating a new font from scratch, creating ligatures that work and I seem to have a problem in the mapping area and the layout of a font.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Somer

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Posting the same question again, and in the wrong forum is not very helpful. Please delete that post and try to stick to one specific question in each thread.

Questions about using VOLT should be asked on the VOLT forum.

There's another route, using OpenType Compiler, which I found relatively easy to use. Read the Tutorial on Adding OpenType Features.

Looking at similar fonts to see how they are designed is often a good starting point.