[FIXED] Not allowed to add more than 1000 characters at Once

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Bug Reports
1

v7.00 build 371,
while opening an east asian font,
after the processing bar went to end, it kept popping up warning messages you are not allowed to add more than 1000 characters at once, before anything I can do,
the font opened normally in v6.xx,
what’s wrong?
?

2

That’s the error message that one would expect to see on trying to insert more than 1,000 characters using the Insert Characters feature, not on opening a font.

I was able to open an Asian font with over 22,000 glyphs without problems in FontCreator 7, so I expect its something unique to the font that you’re opening. What is the name of the font?

3

This can’t happen when you open a font, so please provide more information so we can look into this.

4

thanks for reply. this issues happened only on some CJK fonts, for example MYoyo HK Medium, MStiffHei HK Medium etc by Monotype (rather newly released), while many other CJK fonts opened nomally. :confused: the most strange thing is, these fonts (with problems in v7.0) were opened and operated totally OK in version 6.0, 6.2 and 6.5.

5

MYoyo HK Medium
http://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/myoyo/hk-medium

MStiffHei HK Medium
http://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/m-stiff-hei-hk/hk-medium/web-font

thank you!

6

Thank you for the additional information. We’ve identified the issue, and are now trying to find a solution for it.

I hope we are able to release a new version that solves this issue later this week.

7

We’ve just released a minor update that fixes this issue. Use the built-in update feature to get this latest version.

8

I’ve tried this update (Build 380), it works fine with these CJK fonts now.
Thank you so much! :wink:

9

Hi guys, I’m sorry to report, this problem came again. this time, you are not allowed to add more than 5000 characters at once. I really hope that you may fix this issue logically with a definitive solution, instead of stalling it off with a piece of Band-Aid.

here is a sample font which caused this problem (I think it’s an original one, uploaded by other people).
http://www.fontke.com/plus/download.php?aid=10039767 (try the 3rd download link listed at the left side).

Thanks!

10

The font “DFPKaiShu-GB” opened for me without any problems. The font contains 14,496 glyphs.

I am using the latest build of FontCreator — build 396.

Check for updates, then try again, and see if you still get the same problem.

11

I see the error message when I hover over the first glyph. Over 5000 characters are mapped to it. It is allowed by the specification, but is in fact ridiculous and useless. Nevertheless FontCreator shouldn’t pop up an error.

12

well, if FontCreator shouldn’t pop up an error, I can say nothing about this, while the familiar you are not allowed to add more than 5000 characters at once still keep popping up, with the latest build.

Thank you!

13

Version 7.0.1 which we released this Friday no longer has this issue.

14

yes, it’s OK now with 7.0.1.
Thank you!

15

a little more notes about the causation of this issue.

according to Erwin’s post quoted above, this issue is caused by more than 1,000 / 5,000 characters are mapped to one glyph. as a Chinese language based designer, I understand why the foundry did this for some CJK fonts. since Unicode 2.0, a large set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean characters was introduced to the Unicode standard, called CJK Unified Ideographs, this block includes about 21,000 codepoints / characters for general use of eastern Asian languages. but in the local character set standards, relatively small sets are defined, for the daily / common purpose of use (typically about 7,000 to 13,000 CJK characters included).

in the real world, more than 90% of CJK fonts are designed based on these local standards. the foundries considered how to make these local-based fonts compatible with Unicode, when the user casually typed a seldom used character, a certain “geta mark” was expected to display, to indicate a “missing” character in this font, rather than falling back to the system font. some designers prefer to map thousands of characters to a certain glyph, because the huge number of “missing” characters exist, and they don’t want to make so many dummy glyphs standing in their font individually.

this is a reasonable and acceptable idea when making CJK fonts, and not rare in the real CJK font design. so it’s great that you fixed the issue mentioned above. wanna say THANK YOU again for all of your efforts.

:wink:

16

I’m glad the problem is solved.

Thank you for the additional background information, which makes us better understand the reasoning behind such larges collection of characters mapped to a single glyph.