FC is fantastic for making a large orthographic font for a minority language. I have a serious problem, though.
I am making a font that requires many glyphs (approaching 4000) in the PUA of BMP. With many trials and errors, I found that FontCreator remembers added codepoints but not very well.
SCENARIO:
Two font files A=scratch font where ligatures are created. B=the real font.
I added codepoints to A and made glyphs though not in strict order. I do a lot of copying, cutting, chopping, gluing, sliding and inserting here. Then I added these glyphs to B in an orderly way (to help with programming the tables) and used MS VOLT to program ligature mappings.
Everything worked smoothly up to this point. Next, I needed more glyphs. So, I added codepoints (characters) to A and made a set of new glyphs. FC remembered this and when I added new characters to B, it disabled parsing of tables added using VOLT after the new addition. Obviously, it is confused between the two fonts.
SOLUTION:
Only solution is to reinstall FC and start over with a font B that was saved earlier before the problem occurred.
SUPPORT REQUEST:
Provide a way to turn off FC remembering the character additions/deletions (outside the font) and let the user keep track of them.
As you already know FontCreator can preserve tables added using VOLT when you save your font. Just make sure the “Remove unsupported tables” isn’t checked before opening the font. You can change that flag through the Options window, that is shown when you open the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Font tab.
Although FontCreator preserves those tables, it isn’t able to synchronize them. In other words, FontCreator and VOLT can be used together as long as you don’t change the order of the glyphs within FontCreator (so don’t sort, add or delete glyphs). Also the postscript names should not be changed in FontCreator.
I don’t have a real solution for this issue, maybe you can add glyphs through VOLT?
P.s. There is no need to reinstall FontCreator. If you want to delete an unsupported table (e.g. TSID, TSIP, TSIS and TSIV), select Tables from the Format menu and then select a table on the Unsupported page and press the Delete button.
What do these names stand for?:
TSID, TSIP, TSIS and TSIV
VOLT does not have a facility to add characters, not one I could find. It does not have any help anywhere. It does allow some scripted additions that I have to research to find what they are about.
I can name the characters one by one. But each set of ligatures I add is 39 characters long. Then I’d have to repeat it in FC too. The edit boxes show character numbers, but they are only names. The actual underlying character codes are under Format → mappings. They are not same as the character names that FC gives, though they can coincide.
I wish that there is a way to give a series of charcaters (CMAP) a corresponding codepoints in one batch action. Still I am not sure if VOLT would take them as they are.
I don’t know what the names stand for, but the tables are used by VOLT to generate the actual OpenType Layout tables.
Maybe you can find a solution through VOLT’s import and export options. For more specific questions related to VOLT please try the Microsoft VOLT users community and let us know your results.