I am a complete newbie to font creation. I’ve been at it for a whole three days now.
I have created a font for drawing pictographic symbols. Unlike normal fonts that map one key to one displayed character, this font uses a single keystroke to display a single “brush stroke”, or “pen mark”. Several such strokes are stacked up to draw a single character before the cursor is advanced to the next character.
It works fine in all my Windows applications, and in Firefox, but some people on a language forum I frequent have tried to use it with Macs, with no luck. They tell me their Mac browsers will not use the font, nor will their Mac applications. Instead, they see the web page (or text document) in ordinary Roman letters. I did a search of this forum but didn’t find anything that was helpful to me. (I don’t have a Mac, and don’t really know anything at all about them.)
Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong?
The font can be downloaded at: http://fiziwig.com/glyph/fragz01.html
That web page also shows some examples of its use, which display just fine in IE and Firefox, but not on a Mac.
One thing that is strange about the font is that if one uses Format Naming… and selects the Microsoft Unicode BMP only platform, then the name of the font is Fragz in one place and Fragmentz in another, whereas if one selects the Macintosh Roman platform, then the name of the font is Tinker.
I tried Font Test… using the various items of text which I keep set up in the test window at 24 point and, although I expected various designs to be displayed, what I got was ordinary characters in a font which I did not recognize. So I increased the point size to 72 point, but the size of the text did not change.
I thought that running Tools AutoNaming… might help. It sorted out the naming discrepancies, yet the test display is still the same.
I installed your original font and tried the following sequences with a space between them.
abcde ebdca
Although a through to e are all coded with an Advance Width of 0, when I tried the font using WordPad, on a Windows xp PC, WordPad did not seem to like the 0 Advance Width and the two sequences above produce slightly different designs as the cursor moves forward a small amount for some of the characters.
Autonaming solves that Name inconsistency and might have something to do with the problem. I’d test this first.
William, you can get rid of the default alphabet display if you set Autometrics to 20 or above which of course defeats the purpose of this font. If it works in PC applications, don’t change it of course. I suppose this could also be a problem in the Macs.
I’m afraid I don’t have an easy solution. I think most modern fonts that allow “stacked up” characters, contain OpenType features like glyph substitution (in the GPOS table). This topic explains how to add such features to your font with help of the OpenType Compiler: Adding OpenType features
Thanks for pointing that out. I had no idea that a font had so many names. I fixed the names and uploaded the font again. I will have to wait for my Mac-using friends to report back to me.
I tried your test case (abcde edcba) with MS Word and it worked fine. One peculiar thing I noticed with IE is that if there is a hyphen anywhere in the line, even in a span that uses a different font, any use of Fragmentz font on that same line shows small (about 150 units) offsets between each stacked-up element.
