i am not an expert font maker but have been using fontcreator for years. all i want to do is create a font and have it work in mac and pc. the pc part is easy, but when i give my font to people with macs, they say the glyphs show up empty. this surprises me because the mac mappings show the glyphs are mapped. so, in desperation, i experimented with an opentype font, Arial. opened it, deleted the glyphs, inserted my own, and it seemed to work. but when i removed the dsig table, it didn’t work. in both cases, i changed nothing else about the font, just the glyphs with my own, leaving all other settings the same. both versions, with original dsig table and without, have mac mapping tables which seem to be fine, but when i send the version where the dsig table has been removed, my mac user friend says the glyphs are all empty. anybody have an idea what it happening?
I do not have a Mac so cannot do direct tests. However, as you mentioned a font made with FontCreator and you also mentioned the Arial font, I thought that I would try to investigate whether there are any differences that I could spot.
I started a new font using FontCreator 5.6.
I right-clicked the figure 3, chose Properties… and then the Mappings panel and then highlighted Macintosh Roman. The Encoding area then shows Trimmed table mapping.
I then opened the Arial font: the font arrived with this PC that runs Windows xp professional.
I right-clicked the figure 3, chose Properties… and then the Mappings panel and then highlighted Macintosh Roman. The Encoding area then shows Byte encoding table.
As Trimmed table mapping and Byte encoding table are different phrases I thought it worth posting the finding here. At present I do not understand what each means nor whether that is a significant difference or whether that is something to do with the problem that you are trying to solve. However, it is a difference as between a new font made using FontCreator 5.6 and the Arial font that is on this computer, so maybe it is worth investigating.
As it happens, I do not know whether any of my own fonts work on a Mac.
I hope that this helps and that it is a catalyst to the resolution of the problem.
William Overington
15 May 2009