How to start with Arabic fonts?

Hello;
I’ve been mangling alot with the program and I’m trying to do an Arabic font (because all the time I used to do latin-based fonts) as for a change now!

But the problem is that when I compare the mapping and the data in some originally Arabic fonts that I got from here and there, and I try to do almost the same thing in my new font, things don’t work out good!

I know FontCreator doesn’t show a test for the Arabic font or a Preview and shows letters separated as if they were latin, so usually I install the font partially and test it in my Charmap (Character Map).

I got so many problems and yet I don’t know how to start correctly!
These are some of the problems I faced:

  1. Isolted letters do not show correctly unless I assign the mapping from “Arabic” but not “Arabic presentation A or B.”

  2. Sometimes I assign a value for one of the characters like “BEH” and it happens that when I test it, it types or prints in charmap letter “BEH” other than the one I made! (Isolated form of course).

  3. If I want to make a new character I go usually to add glyph or character and from there I put my new glyph and set the mapping for that glyph (is this really the procedure?).

  4. In some Arabic fonts I see that some of them got a platform of “Microsoft Unicode BMP only” installed only…while others got also “Unicode 2…etc” installed also with the first. What’s the different between the two?

Finally, can anyone please give me the correct procedure to follow in this situation? Shall I leave all the other glyphs for the latin letters empty just like that?

Thanks!

You may have to wait for some help from users who are accustomed to working with Arabic fonts. Just a couple of tips that might help.

  1. Select any Arabic glyphs in the Overview, and press “P” to show them in the Preview Toolbar.

  2. Copy the text from the Preview toolbar and paste it into the Font Test Window.

  3. Insert Characters will add the correct mappings, whereas insert glyph will add no mappings.

  4. You can copy mappings into empty glyphs from other fonts with Paste Special.

I suspect that Arabic reads from right to left so you probably want to set:

Format>Settings>Header>Font Direction Hint

to Strong Right to left, contains neutrals.

You might want to use VOLT to add OpenType features to your font. See the features for the Arabic script for more information.

FontCreator and VOLT can be used together as long as you don’t change the order of the glyphs within FontCreator (so don’t sort the glyphs). Also the postscript names should not be changed in FontCreator.

Hope these help:
http://typophile.com/node/19609
http://typophile.com/node/19348
http://typophile.com/node/20638?from=0&comments_per_page=333
http://29letters.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/generating-arabic-fonts/#comment-1126
http://29letters.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/arabic-calligraphy-written-by-hand-or-type-set-on-the-computer/
All the Best with Flowers
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