I have been looking at various font editors to see if I can create a font for a witting system that contains about 30,000 symbols. I know that Open Type Fonts are said to be able to hold 65,000. Can I use Font Creator to make that many? If so, what is the system requirement for it? I tried to use Font Lab’s Asian Font which is said to be able to handle it, but every time I get to about 20,000, it freezes on me. I have asked them to see if there is a reason for that. (I think it is because it is the demo). I hope that Font Creator can do this because Asian Font cost $2000 USD. I would rather pay the $149. 
Both TrueType fonts and OpenType fonts can hold up to 65535 glyphs. Although FontCreator can handle such large fonts, it wasn’t designed with that in mind. Since FontCreator is fully functional (running in “Professional Edition” mode) during the 30-day trial period, I suggest you give it a try and let us know your results.
Go to Tools, Options, Overview, and uncheck “Smooth Glyphs.” If you’re working with very large fonts you will need all the speed that you get, though I don’t have any problem when working with fonts of 1,000 to 3,000 glyphs.
Set Bookmarks at strategic points in the font for easier navigation.
Thanks for the quick replies. I will continue to try it and see. I hope this will work out. I’ll keep you updated. 
I forgot to mention your system needs enough memory (at least 512MB) and CPU power. A more advanced video card will also improve performance.
Hope this helps!
Yes, this all helps. I was able to get the 65,000+ glyph. I had to be very careful (and patient) because there would be some time between my imputing and the response from FC.
I have a few questions (yes, more). I am trying to create a font for a set of symbols that use fill color (black and/or white). I have done some looking in to it, and it looks as though “fill” colors can not be done. I guess it wouldn’t matter since they are only black and white, but this leads to the next and main question. These symbols are placed around and on top of each other (this is where the “fill” become important) depending on the meaning of the word. Is there a way to make it so that the symbols can be programmed to do that and not just be written side by side when typing? I hope that made sense, because I just read that and it made my head hurt. LOL. Basically, the symbols are not written linear, but as a cluster. I realize that it would be a GREAT deal of work to do this if it is possible, but I hope it is.
Two other things that would help:
- Split the font into two. Work on the small font with 1,000 glyphs, and cut and paste them into the big font when you’re finished.
- Use composites. No.1 might not be possible if you’re using composites because composites cannot be copied from one font to another, but they can greatly reduce the size of the font and the workload.
I hope that made sense, because I just read that and it made my head hurt. LOL. Basically, the symbols are not written linear, but as a cluster.
A picture is worth a thousand words. I haven’t a clue what your talking about.
I figured as much, and I am not that good with words. LOL. This is the site that has all of the symbols that I am trying to make into a font. http://www.signwriting.org
Here is a link to a children’s story written in this system. Little Miss Muppet
I hope this gives you some idea of what I am talking about.
How do I use composites?
I still don’t see what you want to do.
To see how composites work, open Arial or Times and look at áéíóú etc. Right click on the lowercase a, and select “Used by” to see how many times the same glyph is reused in the font.
If you use some shapes repeatedly in many different symbols you can compose some symbols from others. For example, if you wanted to create six symbols for the six differences faces of a dice, you would need only one big square and one small circle.
I’m not sure if I understand you correctly, but you might want to set the advance width to 0 as described here:
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/is-zero-width-enough-to-specify-a-diacritic/580/1
Perhaps you want something like this?
LD Puzzle - font created by LetteringDelights.com
http://www.scrapnfonts.com/searchprod.php?catid=9&subcatid=35
By carefully arranging the FEW parts you wish to use and judicious placement above and below other segments AND beyond the normal glyph bearings, it is possible to fit pieces together, but only when typed in precise order.
Hmm… It looks like I am going to have to explain how this is composed from the bottom up. Then hopefully you may have some suggestions how to go about this. It will take me a while to get the next post with the explaination, but I will get it here before the end of the day.
First off, this system of writing is for various sign languages around the world. Many have tried to make a text string of Latin letters to represent the sign, but it is very hard to read. The main reason is because of the use of space. That is why this system was developed, but there is no way of doing text rendering of it. The only way is to make picture snap of it and the ordering it how it should be.
Now that that is out of the way, I have said that a sign is written in a cluster of symbols. Here is an example of the American Sign for deaf:
This has 4 symbols:
(Notice that two symbols here repeat. This was not a mistake.)
I can make these symbols in FC, but the problem that I am having is getting them to order themselves so that they look like the first picture. Compositing might work, but I would have to make one for every sign there is. That would be like trying to do that for every English word. Not very feasible. Now, there is a way that I can place information regarding where the symbols are related to each other, but I don’t see how making composites if I have to make it for how one symbol relates to every other symbol.
I was going to keep going, but I think that I will take it one step at a time and see if this is workable first. (Unless you think I should keep going?)
Is it at all possible to make a font that can do this and be used in any word processing program like MS Word?
It seems to me that making one composite for each word is the right way to go otherwise it is going to be very hard to position symbol elements correctly if they are typed as separate components. With composites, you can position them precisely.
Using the font would be difficult since you would have to insert the words from a character map. I guess that it would be like writing in Chinese.
You would need to organise the symbols very carefully into logical groups.
Autocorrect could be used in Word to type many of the more common symbols, e.g.
:deaf could autocorrect to the symbol for deaf, whatever Unicode point that is assigned to in the Private Use Area.
I have added some of the composite symbols that I use in my fonts so that you can see how useful composites might be in a font like yours.
I would also advise leaving the ANSI character set untouched. When typing with this font, it may be useful to add notes in English. If you can do that without changing fonts, it will be better. The font name will also appear in application font lists.
The composite glyph members do not themselves have to be mapped. Only the composites need to be mapped.
If I want to allow the user to organize the symbols in the positions that they want, is there a way to do that? I understand that it would be easier to make composites for every word, but the problem is that there are only enough for 65,536 glyph as mentioned before. I would not be able to have very many words if there are about 30,000 symbols to make the composites. Also, I don’t know every word that will be used. So I was wondering if there was a way to have placing of the symbols enabled to the user. Is there a way to have information of placing in a glyph? For example, after each symbol have a location glyph with maybe an x-y?
The limitation with fonts is that there is no way to shift glyphs vertically, only horizontally.
You can, for example, combine a and combining diacritical mark ˜ to get ā, but if you want to combine it with A to get Ā, there is no way to shift it up. You would get something like this:
Ā not Ā and Ī not Ī
You could extend the number of glyphs by using four typestyles: regular, italic, bold, and italic, since the symbols only have one typestyle — regular. For practical limits I don’t think you should aim for more than 20,000 glyphs in each font. Using composites would help a lot to keep file sizes down as long as the same base-symbols were used repeatedly. They would also make later editing easier if you decide that a base symbol is poorly drawn.
The size of this project is probably way too much for one person to undertake. You would be doing very well if you could create one glyph in one minute, and how long is 65,000 minutes? I make it about six months of working 40 hour weeks doing nothing else.
I have been reading this thread with interest and, in particular since you state “Also, I don’t know every word that will be used.”, I am wondering whether the long term answer to the problem might be to use the Adobe SING technology.
I first learned about the existence of Adobe SING technology last Autumn from the following web page and two of the pdfs linked from it.
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2006/10/atypi_2006_pres.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/atypi2006/CharSet%20Journeys.pdf
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/atypi2006/SING%20intro%20TypeTech.pdf
In the http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/atypi2006/CharSet%20Journeys.pdf document the part about SING technology starts at page 26.
I do not know if SING technology is the way to proceed, I am just placing the links to the information here in the hope that it may be useful.
William Overington
14 March 2007