I have been trying to replicate Chinese characters in an inserted glyph as opposed to overriding an existing Chinese character glyph. I have found that despite copying all of the settings for the glyph across (very time consuming), the character looks right, but it is slightly ‘off’ when inserted into Chinese text. If I simply copy over an existing character, there is no problem. So, how do I ensure that ALL of the settings for the new glyph match ALL of the settings for the original Chinese character glyph?
In addition, is there any way for me to copy an individual glyph to a different font file? For these few arcane Chinese characters I am producing, I would ideally like to keep together in one file with some of the characters bold and some regular. In total, I have around 30 glyphs to make of different characters and fonts and by experimenting, if I can create the characters in the different fontsets and then save the new characters to e.g MyArcaneFonts.TTF, that is all I need, since I can find the glyph I need easily with so few in the DTP software I am using.
Any help or pointers, most appreciated. Hopefully, I have explained my predicament well enough.
Look at paste special (Control E). I regularly copy a whole of symbols from one font to another. Copy any or all of glyph outlines, metrics, mappings, and postscript names.
Thank you, I used and experimented with the copy, paste and paste special functions and found that no matter what I did, if I was using a newly inserted glyph, although it looked perfectly aligned in FontCreator, after the font had been installed, the new Chinese character when inserted amongst other ‘original’ Chinese characters of the same font, it was not totally left aligned within the space allocated to it. All other Chinese characters had the same ‘left’ alignment, but my new one was definitely ‘off’. Perhaps I can fudge it by messing with the settings, but the point is that the only differences I want between the new Chinese character and any of the original ones are the character strokes themselves. Any ideas what I might have missed.
It could be an issue with Character Hinting. See the FAQ at the top of the Support Forum. Any new glyphs you create won’t have hinting information. If the problem disappears at large font sizes or when printing, then that is probably the answer.
Off-topic Chinese fonts are incredibly complex. I cannot imagine working with them. Just redrawing the screen when I page down in MingLu takes 3 or 4 seconds (font smoothing is off in Options, Overview). My Unicode fonts with about 2,000 glyphs are quite big enough, but at least they support hundreds of languages.
I thought mastering the writing was painful enough, trying to recreate them even jigsaw-like in Font Creator is making for more problems than I had anticipated. No matter how I copy, I can’t seem to get the exact settings as the original and even copying to new parts of the font area is not working either. For some reason, there is some pulling occurring to the character’s right hand white space, when I put it into my DTP programme, which is not happening in other original characters in the same sentence, so the spacing is ‘off’. It is very annoying, since it means I have to copy the original fonts just for a couple of characters and each font set is around 28MB and the characters are painfully difficult to find and are not sorted in the same way in all fonts. Well, at least I can produce the characters - I’m going in the right directino, but that last 5% is giving me a massive headache - I do so dislike being beaten by a computer!
Thanks for your input - it was very helpful - Best regards - Graham
Thank you for the tip, I will try that, but even if it works, should not the copy and paste function automatically include the right bearing settings. My problem is that I assume too many things. I just can’t think what I have done which has made the original character glyph (now with the new strokes copied into it) change so that in the DTP programme, the white space gets pulled (Please note that the characters are justified in that programme and the programme for want of a better word ‘stretches’ the white space. Unfortunately, for this new character, it is stretching more than the others.
I’ll try to work on the right bearing thing and see if it works - Thanks - Graham