I’m attempting to copy the ‘zero width space’ glyph from Arial MS Unicode to SimSun. I’ve found and selected the character in the Arial font and selected to copy it. I then inserted a glyph after the last glyph in the SimSun font. I then selected the newly created glyph and selected “Paste Special” and selected all the options. I then open the properties for the new glyph and the general tab seems right (it matches what I see in Arial for this glyph) and same for the mappings tab. Both fonts have the same two platforms (Macintosh Roman and Microsoft Unicode BMP only). All settings for each platform for this character are the same between the two fonts.
If I go to Format → Mappings and go to my newly added character in the Gylphs list (after selecting Microsoft Unicode BMP only in the platform list) I see the title ‘ZERO WIDTH SPACE;’ as the third column. This would appear to be correct. If I click on that row the Mappings list shows $200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE, which would also seem to be correct.
But when i save this font out and install it into my windows system I’m not able to view this character in Window’s “Character Map” utility like I can in the Arial MS Unicode font. Yes, I know that’s somewhat of misnomer since you can’t “see” a space, but you get information about it (like it’s unicode character number and it’s name) when you mouse-over it’s cell.
I have also tried using the saved font in an application where I can insert some zero-width spaces and it doesn’t appear to be using the character I defined, which should be ‘invisible’ since it’s zero-width. It works just fine in Arial MS Unicode.
As a means to premptively answer some questions, the Gylph has a type of “empty”, with 0 whitespace before and after the character. The boundings are all 0, and the bearing and advance width are 0. These settings all match the source font where this character works.
I can’t seem to find this character in the font with Character Map nor by using it in an application.
Any suggestions as to what I’m not doing correctly?
Thank you very much for your time,
–James