Hello,
I am trying to make something here which I really don’t know if it is possible at all.
I am trying to make a font with special shapes and characters. In this font I need to fix accents on letters (or below it) when hitting a sequence of letters.
I would like to show an example:
Suppose I created a font where I want to make a special form of “S” + " ’ " on top. I can do that by Kerning, but two problems occur: 1. not all programs define kerning when its due, 2. Kerning fixes the horizontal spacing but not the vertical space between the main letter and the accent above.
To elaborate more, I want the form to change from this:
to this:
by hitting the sequence of letters like: S + E (for example). Is that possible to do without the need of kerning and fixing the bearings for the second letter for example?
I tried the idea of composite glyphs, but seems it doesn’t serve the purpose here, or I was doing something wrong?
Or this thing might not be possible at all?
Thanks
It is possible by Adding OpenType Features, but not many programs support Glyph Substitutions.
In FontCreator you would create your S comma as a composite glyph (or a simple glyph if you prefer), but you need to use another program to add the glyph substitution.
You can also use Microsoft Keyboard layout creator to define shortcuts for typing accented characters. Then you don’t need OpenType features, and can type your composite character in most applications. This will work in exactly the same way as typing Ś or É using conventional fonts.
Combining Comma Above is defined in Unicode, but S comma above is not as far as I can tell, so you would map this character to the Private Use Area and define your keyboard to type that PUA character.
Thanks for the help.
Anyway the S-comma is only an example. I am creating something out of the context of latin alphabet in general.
Seems the last choice is possible somehow but what is the PUA and how to use it ?
The problem is, I am making this font for my page which uses already an older font of the same series but back at that time I used mainly the bearings to place diacresis above the letters, which was a tiresome work and not free of ambiguities. Thus, if I made the new font and made use of keyboard shortcuts, that would be useful for me but not for users to view the page on the net! Otherwise, I would have to re-write everything!
The Private Use Area is a range of 6,400 glyphs with mappings from 57344 decimal (Hex E000). You can create your glyphs anywhere within that range. FontCreator’s Complete Composites feature allocates some of that range to stacking diacritics, Small Capitals, Old Style Figures, etc., but you don’t need to worry about that for your custom font.
The problem you have is that visitors to your website will need to download and install your custom font to view the web page as it was designed. A work-around would be to post links to PDF files with your font embedded, or to render the page using PNG graphics.
Thanks a lot of the information.
Unfortunately, though my page is simple but it is hard to convert it easily to PDFs or PNG.
You might like to take a look at it: www.geocities.com/ayvarith/
Can you give more information about PUA? Is it loaded automatically when I start a new project for example in FontCreator ? or I should load it manually later on?
Thanks
If you can display the text in your font in any Windows application then it is easy to convert to PDF (use CutePDF) or PNG (use PDF-XChange or FastStone Capture). Using 16 collour PNG instead of 256 colour GIF would make the files a bit smaller so the pages will load faster.
If you’re using the Professional edition of Font Creator then use Insert Character to add a range of characters from the PUA. In the Home Edition you will have to use Insert Glyphs.
When you start a new font there are no PUA characters in the font.
Thanks again for the information, I will check my options!