Odana Update

Download 7-zip archive.

Updated Odana with Petite Capitals, Stylistic Alternates, Character Variants, Standard, Discretionary, and Historical Ligatures, Stacking Fractions, and OpenType features to access many of these extra glyphs.

I have been trying the Odana font initial capitals in PagePlus X5.

They are really nice.

I particularly like the T and the Q with its long tail.

William Overington

21 May 2013

Although there is only one type style, the update to version 2.60 took a couple of days as I had to update several things for FontCreator 8.0.

  1. Added kerning groups and adjustment pairs for Titling Capitals
  2. Added a few pairs for Initial Forms, and adjusted some side-bearings.
  3. Updated CompositeData.xml. In the process I realised that I had to update UnicodeData.txt too.
  4. Updated UnicodeData.txt for Titling Capitals. For Complete Composites to work correctly, the text file must define them as uppercase Letters (Lu), while Petite Capitals are defined as lowercase letter (Ll).
  5. Used a workaround to export the font with hinting: 1) Make Empty the Initial Forms that were causing hinting export to fail, 2) Export the font with Autohinting for the other glyphs, 3) Undo make empty and copy the initial forms, 4) Paste the Initial forms to the Truetype font, 5) Export that again with the Original Hinting. The Export Font As Truetype font option is a big improvement on FontCreator 7.5, as you don’t have to save a font as a project to modify it.

Export Font As.png

Updated to version 2.70.

After extensive cleaning up and smoothing of the Initial Forms to reduce the number of nodes, hinting succeeded without the need for the above workaround. Importing from WMF is never very good, so a lot of smoothing is required to get a high quality result.

Updated to version 2.80.

After more cleaning up and smoothing of the Initial Forms to reduce the number of nodes, hinting succeeded without the need for workarounds. All of the complex glyphs have now been smoothed as much as necessary, further reducing the number of nodes.
Smooth Curves.png
Standard ligatures were added for fff, fffl, and discretionary ligatures for sf, sfi, sfy, sh, and sk. More kerning pairs, including some positive pairs, brings the total to over 20,000.

Version 2.90 adds colour to the Initial Forms and completes the Latin Extended Additional, Number Forms and Dingbats Character Sets. The 7-zip archive also includes smaller Web and WOFF versions with only a few symbols. The web versions still contain the Coloured Glyphs for Stylistic Alternates, which can currently be viewed only in Firefox.

Updates to TTFautohint seem to have fixed the issues with hinting.

See this tutorial thread to see how the coloured glyphs were created.

Version 3.00 replaces Initial Forms with Stylistic Alternates, and replaces the previous Stylistic Alternates with Character Variants. The Character Variants work fine in PagePlus X9, but not in Affinity Designer for Windows RC4, which shows only cv01.

lookup CharacterVariants {
  sub asterisk -> [asterisk asteriskmath uni2051 uni2042 uni203B];
  sub plus -> [plus uni2795 uni271A uni271B uni271C];
  sub at -> [at uni260E uni260F uni2121 uni213B];
  sub copyright -> [copyright uni2117 uniF000 estimated uni2139];
  sub multiply -> [multiply uni2715 uni2716 uni2717 uni2718];
  sub dagger -> [dagger uni2622 uni2623 uni26A1 uni2620];
  sub daggerdbl -> [daggerdbl uni26A0 uni2691 uni26B0 uni26B1];
  sub bullet -> [bullet uni204D uni2023 uni2767 uni2712];
  sub blackcircle -> [blackcircle newmoon waxingcrescentmoon firstquartermoon waxinggibbousmoon];
  sub circle -> [circle fullmoon waninggibbousmoon lastquartermoon waningcrescentmoon];
  sub uni2600 -> [uni2600 sunrise uni26C5 uni2602 uni2603];
}

Version 3.10 fixes the kerning classes bug and adds some more kerning pairs for the fancy drop caps (Stylistic Alternates).

Version 3.20 fixes some bugs, and adds more kerning pairs.

Version 3.30 removed Titling Capitals and replaced them with a GPOS Titling feature. The contours and spacing of many glyphs were improved.

Kerning classes were improved and many more pairs added (now over 40K)

Localised Forms were added for Romanian, and ligatures for Dutch. The archive contains smaller, unhinted web versions.

Version 3.50 further improved the colour glyphs and some other glyphs, replaced contextual ligatures with a stylistic set, harmonised the height of symbols and arrows, added four glyphs with ogonek for Nordic and two glyphs for irony punctuation. Some kerning pairs were also added. The WOFF versions are unhinted to reduce the file size to a minimum.

Version 3.61 uses 8192 units/em instead of the usual 2048 units/em to support finer detail for the coloured decorative capitals. The rarely used latin extended superscripts were removed, leaving only those few required for Ordinals. A positionindicator glyph was added to Miscellaneous Technical, and globewithmeridians and electriclightbulb glyphs were added to Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs. The clock symbols were improved. An Access All Alternates feature was added. The WOFF versions are unhinted to reduce file sizes. If you want to add hinting to the WOFF versions, this can be done using the free ttfautohint utility, which is what FontCreator uses to hint fonts.

Version 3.62 uses Typo Metrics for Line-spacing.