I have a question and do not know the technical terminology

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Support
1

I thought I found my answer when I saw the other post on “combining letters to make one”. I have the same issue.

Let’s say you want to make a phonics font. You know the letter a with the dash (-) on top represents the long sound of a. But there are many different things that can go over the letter a and make it sound different.
What I would like to do is be able to type the letter a key and then the hyphen key and what should appear would be the ā.

I have searched this forum high and low and found so much helpful information. I am still on my trial version of Font Creator and what I know now, I have learned solely from Font Creator. I know what in the world kerning a font is! :laughing: Yeah me! I am very new to this and love the way this program works. I am on day 5 of my trial and know I am going to buy it.

I do not know what the techie terms are for what I want to do but my head is exploding from the ideas I have for new fonts. This is just one of them. For now this is the only thing stopping my progress. I have figured out the rest of how to do what I need to on Font Creator.

If you only know the term for what I want to do, the what this thingy is called by typing 2 or 3 keys and getting one letter (or picture) I would be so happy. I can then know what I am searching for.

I appreciate this forum and anyone who is willing to help. Please remember, I have no idea what all the terminology is, but I know how to click, paste and drag contours like there is no tomorrow. :smiley:

Thanks to you all!!

2

I’m really stretching to say anything about this – but I hate to see a question without a response…

  1. Fonts may be formed by combining diacritic marks with letters. These include: grave, acute, caron, cedilla, macron, etc. You may also use multiple diacritic marks to create a single character, such as, Latin Capital Letter A with Ring Above and Acute. (There are probably 5,000 defined combinations.)

  2. Font Creator Program (FCP) vastly simplifies this creation of composite characters. In an edit window the steps are:
    a. On the menu Insert/Glyph,
    b. Select a glyph from display
    c. Repeat.

The first insert would select a lower case “a”. The second time you would select the macron. Thus, with slight adjustment for clarity and beauty, you would have a long a, or as Postscript calls it “amacron”. Repeat as needed.

The next steps deal with mapping the character so it has a name and a number. It’s in the Users Guide.

Back at the main window, select and right click on the newly created character (amacron).

–Select Properties. On the general tab enter “amacron” (don’t quote anything).

–On the Mappings Tab, hit Select button which brings up Blocks and Characters windows. What you’re trying to do is find the corresponding value for this character. You may have to go through each Block, reading under Characters until you find the character you created. You have to be knowledgable enough to know you’re looking for a “Latin Small Letter A With Macron”. And the order of these characters is not obvious. Other fonts can show you the way.

–From the 3rd block, Latin Extended-A, second entry, select the item (Latin Small Letter A With Macron), click ok and you have your mapping to decimal 257. Your character is now built and defined. Now for usage.

–Too quickly it is; Save As the font with a new name, Install into Windows, and Use.

Next topic: how to use the characters which are not on your keyboard. See Help for the gospel.

  1. “To type special characters (like the copyright sign) of the font in your word processor or page layout program, hold down the Alt key, and then, by using the numeric keypad, type 0 (zero) followed by the corresponding character code. Make sure NUM LOCK is on.”

If you know the character number (257 in this case) you can type Alt 0257. Upon release the character will show if everything is correct! (For example, in this font Alt 0163 gives £). The amacron is not on this font thus doesn’t show.

  1. You can use charmap.exe (Microsoft’s inadequate character mapper). Dial in the font you are using and all the characters will be displayed. Select and copy the one you want. Paste it on your application where you want it. See the FCP Manual.

  2. I think there is another way from the keyboard which was in your question, such as using a keystroke enhancer but I don’t know it. See the FCP manual.


    This is really long. My point was to indicate it is easy using FCP to create composite characters. I can create composite characters maybe 1 a minute… if everything is setup right.

I can’t use them, but I can build them!

Welcome to FCP and Good 'ol Font Heaven!!

Dick Pape

3

Well explained about composites Dick.

The feature whereby you can type an accent like ` followed by a vowel like e to type a composite character like è is not built into Font Creator. Open Type technology can do this. However, why make life more complicated than it is already? In Word, you can easily create a shortcut keystroke to type a macron or any other character. If you want a method that will work in other Windows programs, you can use Perfect Keyboard Pro or any similar macro utility.

If you defined a shortcut of hypen a to type ā, how would you type non-automatic? In my experience it is better to use Control key modifiers like Ctrl-a or Ctrl-Alt-a as one can already do to type áéíóú in a single keystroke. I use Pāli ā macron so much that I prefer to use another shortcut like ctrl-alt-a to Select All. Another way is to define the shortcut or autoreplace in Word as aa = ā, ii =ī, uu = ū, as double vowels are not normally used.

To search for the names of letters, look at UnicodeData.txt in the High-Logic program directory, or better still, download Babel Map (347 K + 289 K help) It is a Unicode character map.

4

Bhikkhu Pesala you brought it up …

The UnicodeData.txt document includes many extra columns of stuff. For example:

00AB;LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK;Pi;0;ON;;;;;Y;LEFT POINTING GUILLEMET;*;;;

I recognize some of the fields: unicode hex number, unicode name, and alternative unicode name but nothing in between or after. Is there some document which identifies each variable?

I haven’t but probably will check the web site.

Dick

(By the way I put together a data base combining everything I could steal about Unicode names and Postscript names with hex and decimal code values. It has been great help when trying to research character names and numbers when you can search for combinations of words. This is not an offer “To Give It Away” as it is written in MS Access and doesn’t travel well. Just an offfer of a tool idea.)

5

WOW! Thank you both so much for all of that. In the words of Wayne and Garth I’m not worthy!

Although I am not sure if I could duplicate that; or maybe I can I just don’t know I am doing it, :laughing: I think I should have been a little more specific about what I needed.

I completely understand what you both are saying about how the characters I mentioned are already there and I do use them from the insert symbol thingy in Word.

What I am creating is a font for homeschoolers so they can make their own work sheets. I should probably come up with a different name for them than ‘font’ because when you say ‘font’ the stable datum is letters you type on the keyboard. In my thing-a-ma-jiggy, if you type the letter A on the keyboard, you will not get the letter A. You will get a picture of some sort; a ball, an apple yada yada..

Now what I was asking about was how to type that keystroke A and another keystroke that would actually be a dotted line X. So the idea is that you type A and then X and they are on top of each other. I sure wish I knew how to stick a picture on here then I could show you the end result.

I finally figured out how to do what I was asking you all about. I had to change the ?bearings? (those dotted line thingys on either side of the imported picture) so that the letter I wanted to go over the other would go over it correctly.

I do want to thank you so much for replying back to me. I thank you for not letting me hang without my question being answered. :smiley: I hate to see that too, I am too new to this to really help anyone. I probably use this program backwards and the long way. I can figure out the short cuts later. :slight_smile:

Thanks again! I will keep checking this forum for info and eventually will be as knowledgeable as all of you; I hope!

6

If only there were a non-deleting Backspace on the keyboard, half your troubles would be over. I had a similar problem and never was able to resolve it satisfactorily. As usual, Bhikkhu Pesala tried to help!
See:
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/strike-through/89/1
It is possible that someone knows how to invoke the character, among the control codes less than 32, (character string 8, I think).
I would still like to do what you wish to do.

Ugly, but but no longer young!
Joe.

7

It sounds like all you need is a combining diacritical mark that you can type with a key. Try assigning it to the underline character _ make it non-spacing, and position it with a negative side-bearing.

Ṭḥịṣ ḷịṇẹ ọf̣ ṭẹx̣ṭ ụṣẹs ṭḥẹ combining diacrtical ḍọṭ ḅẹḷọẉ

There is a problem with the position here, but that is a problem with the forum code, not the font itself.

Joe, there is a non-deleting back-space key on the keyboard, it is the left cursor key.

8

Hi again,

Bhikkhu Pesala, I don’t understand all of that diacritical stuff. Remember, I am a newbie, only 7 days old.

I got it to work for me the way I want it to. For all I know we are all talking about the same thing. I just don’t understand all of the techie terms.

Joe, I have no idea what invoking characters, codes less than 32 and 8 string characters are. But I do understand that you had a similar problem to mine. What were you trying to do? And, you are only as young as you feel and we are all ‘pretty’ in our own unique ways. :wink:

For my next project, I need to figure out how to type 3 keystokes and get one character. I got it to work on a couple of them, but not consistant for the whole keyboard. Like typing abc will work but typing afg will not. I am nothing if not persistant, so I am sure I will get it eventually. When I do, I will come back and share with all of you.

:smiley: Have a happy day!

9

Trisha,

All I am trying to do is to type a character, whether alphabetic or numerical, step back without deleting it, then, by typing the ‘/’ character, strike through the character to the right which I have just typed and then move on to the next character. This is required for cancelling in mathematics and for an answer grid in puzzles that I make. (Similar to cryptograms). Another possibility could be to type a character and then by typing the ‘/’ key have the cursor move back, place the ‘/’ over that character and then move on to the next character.

:frowning: With Bhikkhu Pesala’s help I am able to do this in the Font → Test text-editor fairly readily but Microsoft Word refuses to do this for some reason. Its cursor insists on ignoring the nil-advance that I set and moves on anyway to type the ‘/’. Did you try your plan in Word, Pesala?

Joe.

10

I actually started using FCP to make a polytonic Greek font, which requires several diacritics with negative advance. Word never seemed to do it right, but when I printed, everything looked just fine. Actually try printing out your efforts before you give up the boat here. Microsoft is not exactly the best at implementing all standards exactly right, but in the end, they usually work ok anyway.