Hi, as I work more with fonts I notice that something is not quite right. My main goal right now is to take a Japanese font and replace the western alphabet section with alphabet glyths from better-looking western fonts. I’ve largely been successful thanks to the help of everyone, but now, I notice that upon merging two fonts, the western alphabet of the new merged font appears largely correct, but with a few slight display anomalies. I don’t know how to explain it but the problem becomes more obvious when I use certain programs that uses the new font and I realize that there a slight “changes” in the look of glyths of the new font. In short, they just don’t look 100% like the original one…almost but not quite.
So I’m just wondering, are there any certain rules or tips I should watch out for when merging two fonts together in general? Up until now, I’ve just opened the two fonts I want to merge, and copy and paste glyths from one font to the other, and save that new font and use it. I guess I’m asking, is merging two fonts as simple as copy and pasting or are there more advanced steps I am missing? Any insight into this problem will help greatly because i want my fonts to look 100% like the original.
Hinting information from the glyphs that are pasted will be lost. This may account for slight differences, especially noticeable at small sizes on screen, but not on prinouts. Font metrics may also be different, so the pasted characters may be proportionally larger or smaller than in the original font.
Prepare a document with alternate identical lines of text to compare the latin characters from the original font to your font.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Thank you Bhikkhu Pesala, I was suspecting something along the lines of this. So, are there ways in order to keep the hinting information of the font? And, the difference in sizes you mentioned is definitely a problem I encountered as well, as the modified font was displaying at sizes larger than the original. What would be the best strategy to counter this problem? I would imagine it involving the resizing of fonts but I don’t know the proper way to handle this…
I don’t think there’s any solution to the first problem.
The other problem may be caused by different layout units/em values on the Settings, Header tab. I tested copying a character from one font to another after changing the value from 1024 to 1000, then copied a glyph from the latter font to a copy of the same font with a value of 1024 funits/em. The copied glyph was slightly bigger.
To change the layout units/em value for a font (temporarily will do). Select all glyphs in the overview, copy, change the funits/em value, and paste them back in. Hinting is not lost during this operation, but all composites become simple glyphs. That will happen when copying glyphs from one font to another anyway.
If you use this trick to change the funits for a font permanently, you will need to recalculate font metrics, underline thickness and position, and strikeout thickness and position on the metrics, post and general tabs of the settings dialogue respectively.
Recommended units/em value are multiples of 2: 1024, 2048, 4096, etc. Many fonts that originated on the Mac have values of 1000 units/em.
I have no help, but the same problem, so I hope you share the results when you are finished. Are you also making an effort for the Roman characters to be slightly smaller so that the Japanese characters end up proportionately larger?
I’m a bit surprised on entering the Japanese reading world, that everyone can handle their characters being printed so small on the screen. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes but every single japanese font in the world has the Kanji way too comparitively small. I don’t understand it… anyone seen any solutions to this problem..
If a program is internationally aware, like the Opera browser, then you can set the font to fixedsys and the size to 20. The program will then map the Kanji characters to another font and use size 20 and leave the fixedsys characters at 9px (because fixedsys has no other size).
Okay, I’m sorry for being very late on this topic as I managed to solve my problem just recently. Okay, first of all, to clarify the situation those “anomalies” I had were due to loss of hinting and as I was using Windows XP with ClearType ON (which uses hinting), my fonts looked slightly glitched sometimes. To eliminate this problem entirely, I used a free utility called TTFGASP, which adds a GASP record into the font for all sizes. Once you have enabled GASP at all font sizes, turn Windows XP font smoothing to “Standard”, which uses GASP instead of ClearType to smooth out the font. Now, the font looks 100% perfect with no glitches. I believe this solved the problem as GASP does not use hinting whereas ClearType does.
@spurrymoses: I read your other thread too and I think your problem is not the same as mine. However, I believe I did encounter your problem earlier and I managed to solve that, thanks to Bhikkhu Pesala’s help in this thread. I believe your problem lies in the fact that the fonts you want to combine contain totally different font metrics. Why don’t you try the following and tell me if it solves your problem (it did for me, although my problem wasn’t as extreme as yours):
-
Decide which font contains the font metrics you want your final font to have. I usually pick the western font’s metrics as my base as the western alphabet is more prone to being “warped” at different sizes, it is not really noticeable when it comes to kana/kanji.
-
Load up that font which contain the metrics that you like your final font to have and go to Format → Settings. Copy down ALL the information from each tab including the numbers under “Additional Metrics” in the “Ranges” tab even if they are greyed out.
-
Now load the other font(s) that you want to merge and for each font, load it into Font Creator, CTRL+A to select all the glyths and CTRL+C to copy them to clipboard. Next, go to Format → Settings and enter all the information you copied from step #2 into the tables of this font. Make sure that the numbers under “Additional Metrics” (in the “Ranges” tab) are modified to match step #2’s as well. If they are greyed out, you need to select “Version 2” for “Version” (in the Ranges tab).
-
Now that you’ve changed the font metrics, CTRL+V to paste the previously-copied glyths back onto the font. That’s it! Now both fonts should be similarily-sized. If you want to combine the fonts, just simply copy-and-paste glyths from one font to the other.
- Please note, as stated earlier, by copying/pasting glyths from one font to another, you will loss hinting and may encounter slight glitches when using ClearType font smoothing under Windows. To counter this, you must add a GASP record (using a tool such as TTFGASP) for all font sizes and enable “Standard” font smoothing under Windows, as previously described at the beginning of this thread.
You can also update the GASP table with Font Creator.
To enable grayscale support select Grayscale from the Format menu. Delete all entries. Now add a new entry and set “Grayscale rendering”.