I just noticed that when I create a new file, with or without outlines included, there remains present a host of foreign hidden characters with glyph outlines. If I go and look at the whole character set then I can see Korean, Arabic, Chinese characters as well as others, too. I thought that starting a new file would result in a basic template of 128 or 256 characters?
I also tried to start a new file without outlines and then clicked on the make empty icon or make simple and the result was a full set of sans serif glyphs, and nice ones too.
I am confused as I expected that when I start a new file I just start with the basic ASCII or ASCII2 chatracter set. Can someone explain how Font Creator works.
You see the sample characters.
See the manual:
http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator/manual/usingtheglyphoverview.html
You can change the font used to show the samples as explained here:
http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator/manual/options_overview.html
The standard ASCII character set has a very limited coverage for a modern font. If you’re taking the trouble to design 52 alpha characters and 10 digits, the default new font template with outlines included will add the basic accents required for Latin 1 Supplement and Latin Extended A. By completing the incomplete glyphs (the empty ones with the blue outlines) using Complete Composites, most of the ANSI character set is complete.
Whether you’re making fonts to sell, for free distribution, or only for your own personal use, they may need some accented characters and symbols like © ®™ ¶ etc.
The ANSI Character Set provides reasonable glyph coverage for a font designed primarily for English, but that would also be useful to French, German, or Spanish authors.
The “Include Outlines” option is intended to save you time. Rather than creating all of the character outlines from scratch, some generic outlines are included to get you off to a quick start. You can easily modify them later to match the rest of your font.
Thanks for your usual helpful suggestions. But unfortunately either I have not read the correct part of the manual or I have become too superficial in my reading approach.
I think I understand both suggestions mentioned by Erwin. I also understand the Ansi character set which is the one I used by default rather than ASCII2 as I mentioned in my earlier post. I just could not remember Ansi and opted for the older ASCII2 to indicate that normally the number of codepoints I work with when developing a font is of that order: in other words the number of characters I have added in all does not exceed 300 or thereabout.
However, It surprises me when I go and look at the character set to find so many additinal characters which I thought should not be there. Let me give you the following example which I created after reading your answers.
I created a new file called “testfile3” and clicked on the “don’t include outlines”. The result you can see in the file called screenshot1. So far so good. I then saved the file as testfile3 and proceed to open such file with a font manager program to view the character set. What I saw is shown in screenshot2.
So far so good. But as I advance to the character set beyond this first page I can see thousands of other charcaters. I took several screenshots but I just add another one as each screenshot may occupy too much space: see screenshot5, the one with the chinese characters.
This is what I do not understand. The whole character set I should be able to see in my testfile3 should be the original number of characters shown in screeshot1.
I trust this explain my question and why I feel confused to see so many chacacters and glyphs in my testfile3 character set which should not be there.
Thanks for your patience.
You should be asking Black Sun software who make your Font Manager X-Fonter about this — the Chinese characters are not shown in FontCreator and do not exist in the font.
I investigated this issue and it is a problem with the X-Fonter filters which must inherit characters from other default font files in the windows system font folder. Nothing to do with Font Creator. May be I have to consider a move to MainType!
That would be a very wise decision!