hi, im new to making fonts, and I’m interested in purchasing this program, but I need to know, is it possible to create a fully functional arabic font?
For those who don’t know anything about arabic, basically, the form of the letter changes depending on the letter that follows.
I know this is possible, since if I open character map and scroll down in Times New Roman, I can type things like this:
با - which is a combination of ب and ا.
So, I’m guessing Times New Roman is an Open Type font (by the Big O next to it) and I’d like to know if this program can create fonts whose letters change, and if so, how to go about it.
The second issue is regarding vowels. There are 9 arabic vowels which go ON TOP of the letters. Is this also possible?
If this isn’t possible, does anyone know of a program or method that I can use to do this?
Thanks
irf2k
I think you need Open Type features, which Font Creator doesn’t support yet. It will preserve them if they exist, but cannot edit them.
Take a look at this earlier thread and check out the Microsoft Typography Developers tools. VOLT is free.
The particular version of the Times New Roman font which you are using may be an OpenType font yet the fact that one can open the character map within an application when using a font and find ligature or variant forms does not necessarily mean that the font is an OpenType font. For example, my Quest text font, available as a free download from the http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm web page is not an OpenType font, yet if one uses Insert | Symbol in Microsoft Word (I use Word 97, other versions may be different) when using the Quest text font one can find many latin ligatures, such as ct and st and ppe, available for direct insertion into a document.
If at some future time Quest text were to be an OpenType font there could then be a glyph substitution table included within the font which table could provide information to an application program such as a wordprocessing program that when it gets a character c and a character t together that instead of displaying the glyph for c and the glyph for t that the ct glyph should be displayed. Even then, that OpenType font could also, as I understand it though I have not done it myself, have the ct ligature directly available in the character map within the Unicode Private Use Area.
An OpenType font where that is done is the Code2000 font which is a shareware font which is available on the internet at the http://home.att.net/~jameskass/ webspace.
William Overington
thnx for the help guys. I will look for a program with Open Type support and begin learning the basics.
once again, thnx