Hi Charlie - welcome to the Forum. (Been a long hot summer with one day of winter! Lucky You Come Texas!)
You posted a very long note so I get a chance to respond likewise!
- Alphabetic files with Symbol = True. They’re easily seen in MT and drag and dropped to FC.
—a. Check Format/Platform Manager: Change Symbol to Microsoft Unicode BMP Only.
—b. Format/Settings - Classification (Panose)/Family Kind = Pictorial and Font Family/Class = Symbolic
—c. I recalculate Format Settings/Metrics. (Not sure why they change when going from Platform to Platform but cleans up line spacing anyway.)
—d. Format/Settings/Ranges: Recalculate Average Character Width. Recalculate Unicode Character Ranges. Recalculate Code Page Character Ranges. (This is probably the one you miss).
That’s all that’s generally needed.
To Test - do (F5) Font Test and check window in top line. Should say ANSI rather than Symbol. I think that’s the proof every thing is correctly entered.
–Unmarked glyphs are due to Postscript names not being enabled. Go to Format/Post… Check Include Postscript Names and press Generate Names. This should rename each glyph to the current mapping. If they are still messed it is possible the maps are messed and have to be corrected.
The way I tend to do this is get either Macintosh or Microsoft maps correct (and normally one is ok to begin with) then delete the other Platform and re-add it and “Add Character to Glyph Index Mappings” by selecting either Copy from Macintosh (if you are readding Microsoft) or Generate from Postscript - depending on which is correct.
Worst case you have to remap all characters for one platform and then use this to copy (readd) to the second platform. (There may be an easier way to do this – but this is straightforward and keeps font names the same.)
– Scrambled glyphs (after doing the above) likely means the maps were messed to begin with. I would manually remap (Format/Mappings) if necessary. Very few fonts are truly scrambled thank garsh. Unmapped glyphs show as tiny square in upper left corner. They have to be manually assigned or cannot be referenced anywhere.
The time-consuming part for me is to manually remap a font. The routines could be improved to make it easier to move from glyph to glyph without having to move the slider bar up to the next 5 fonts etc. After awhile you understand the sorting order of letters so map assignments are straightforward (adding 1) to prior map.
- Files that show up as Unknown Font in MT – some may be invalid in FC and if so cannot be fixed. Often FC can simply Autoname the font to correct it. Drag it to FC to see.
→ I don’t think MT cares if it’s otf or not. FC will change them to TTF when saved – true. There is no loss of Microsoft Open Type functionality afaik. It does remove the Type1 routines - afaik.
- Fonts that show up as – This is caused when font names are messed.
→ Format/Naming will show missing critical entries and can be quickly proven by trying to (F5) Font Test and get the red error msg “Font is not valid, make sure all required Microsoft Naming Fields are available”.
→ Go to Format/Naming to check – sometimes the names are in Unicodes such as: \0627\0644\0633\0644\0627\0645. They have to be changed to Latin letters.
→ Sometimes naming fields are missing. Easiest fix is use Tools/Autonaming, Next, Next and the names should be repaired. Again, the proof of concept is (F5) Font Test. (I’m surprised to find out they fix automatically for this problem – will have to test.)
- “Fonts that show up fine” – this covers a variety of likely topics. I’ll outline a few possibilities:
–a. Format/Settings/Layout/Units per em. If this is at variance with the physical size of the glyph you can adjust either the Units Per Em and/or Tools/Glyph Transformer/Output/Scale until you get the right proportion… Generally I would set Units per em to some common value (1000, 1024, 2048) and use the Glyph Transformer until things were right.
–b. It is possible the Glyph Metrics are wrong and using Tools/Autometrics can fix really messed alignments. It works “perfectly” for vertical fonts, but oblique or italic fonts may need special analysis.
–c. If I remember the Bastarda Plain has very large glyphs. Easily they can be adjusted down by one of the two methods above: changing units per em or using Glyph Transformer. (Thats one of the few I think I’ve enountered which are extremely large…)
–d. I think I fix the Out of Range errors by deleting all blank glyphs (Edit/Select Incomplete and Delete) and then look for glyphs which are apparently blank or weird looking. Those may hold messed shapes causing the problem. You might look at each and see if it’s repairable – but be careful sometimes they will lock up the system and you’ll lose the FC session. (Be careful trying to Validate these for the same reason.)
At this time, I tend to look at the letter from the thumbnail view and then just delete it without looking further. I can always add a glyph and form a new character if I have to. More often than not they are not repairable even if you can edit the letter.
- Good Maintenance Practices. I have an earlier post which rather describes the whole setup better. But, in summary:
–a. Rename them to the internal font name (use a renaming program).
–b. Store all fonts in a single alphabetic file. There are programs to help this. I have 107 alphabetic groups so that no group exceeds ~15,000 fonts.
–c. Replace Windows Explorer with (another program) because it will walk through large font files without pausing at each one. It reads fonts as quickly as Windows Explorer reads jpg or bmp files. (It handles my 15k folders which are deadly in Explorer.) I use it to scan/find Vendors or Names of the entire file. Very fast and very needed.
–d. Use (a program) to find duplicate fonts. This one lets you match on filename (or parts of file name), and/or file size (or delta/variance in size) and/or file date (or a variance) and/or CRC. You need all 4 variables.
I can drop 50% of new fonts without looking at them if they are Same Name and Same Size and Same Date. By varying these parameters I can get potential duplicates down to about 20% before I have to look at each one. My goal is to replace old fonts with updated (new versions) and have valid “same name” duplicates. The only way to do this is to see if the vendor is different or if the design is different or if the Version or internal date is different. By cutting out the “chaff” I have enough energy (or daylight) to get to the wheat.
e. MT should be your font classifier with Groups. Look at a font and assign it to a group. I would use Shortcuts or Copy – but never Move from the main folder. Copies are good because you can “correct” them with FC and still have the original version to fall back to. If you don’t like a category – delete the Group or Copy. Has no impact on your Master File.
As far as checking fonts I do the following on all fonts:
–1. Make sure it’s readable. MT shows two readability errors by sorting on Font Type to get messages of or unknown font type. Fix these in FC. IF FC can’t read them == I delete them.
–2. Fix Symbol vs Alphabetic platforms. Find them in MT and fix them in FC.
–3. For all fonts of “special interest” in FC I check all the Format entries, Font/Validate and Tools/Autoname. I definitely put in the Classification/Panose Family Kind value which I can use in MT.
There may be quite a few entries but they are generally one-button fixes and will standardize my fonts. Often Date Created and Date Modified are defaulted to Jan 1, 1904. Easy to fix it to Today for documentation purposes.
It may take 2-3 minutes per font == but it’s forever corrected.
Hope you learn to work with these programs and understand their features – they are very well designed and written and I love them a lot!!
