My latest font is my version of Hermann Zapf’s Palatino. Why yet another version of Palatino?
My font has tighter default leading — 12 on 10 point, instead of 13.5 on 10 point, so it is more economical for copy-fit.
Petite Capitals (x-height Small Capitals) are mapped in the PUA
Small Capitals (80% of Caps Height) are mapped in the PUA to support kerning in Serif PagePlus
OpenType Features for Alternative Fractions, Scientific Inferiors, Subscript, Superscript, Ordinals, Denominators, Numerators, Fractions, Oldstyle Figures, Alternate Annotation Forms, Stylistic Alternates,¹ Petite Capitals, Small Capitals, Petite Capitals From Capitals, Small Capitals From Capitals, Capital Spacing, Discretionary Ligatures, Standard Ligatures, Stylistic Sets,² Ornaments, Character Variants (for easy access to some symbols, Terminal Forms, Historical Ligatures, and Historical Forms.
The fonts are released under GNU license, so anyone can modify them, add support for other languages, etc., to suit their needs. Just give the font a new name and retain the GNU license agreement.
They includes a wide range of symbols and dingbats.
¹ The Stylistic Alternates (salt) have coloured glyphs, which are supported by Windows 10, and by Firefox and Chromium browsers like Vivaldi. In applications and operating systems that do not support them, the glyphs will be monochrome.
² One Stylistic Set (ss01) is designed for use by Pāḷi scholars who use the Velthuis encoding system: aa = ā, ii = ī, etc. By enabling this feature Velthuis encoded text is displayed as Unicode text. A second is for Romanian Localised Forms of S and T comma to replace S and T cedilla. (Localised Forms are not supported in Serif PagePlus).
Very nice font with a very large character set. How many where (semi)automatically generated with the Glyph Transformer feature (insert characters, and complete composites)?
Insert Characters was used only as part of Glyph Transformation presets.
I find that the italic glyph transformer is fine on generating italics, and not too bad for Small Caps and Superscripts, but rather less useful for bold as it treats thick and thin strokes the same. It is better to trace a bitmap and then smooth it. A Glyph Transform preset was used to create ligatures too, but some work was needed afterwards to make them into proper Alphabetic presentation forms.
Of 1944 Glyphs in the Regular type style, 780 are composites, but complete composites was also used to create many more that are now simple glyphs: Æ and other ligatures, and all glyphs with cedilla, horn, ogonek, bar, etc. Old Style Figures, Nut Fractions, stacking diacritics, and combining diacritics all used Complete Composites too, at least as the inital stage of design.
Copy and paste was used to duplicate the Geometric Symbols, Arrows, Miscellaneous Symbols, some Maths Symbols, and Dingbats (nearly 600 glyphs) from my other fonts. They were then resized en masse to fit the Caps Height of this font.
The greatly improved accuracy of complete composites in version 5.6 saves a lot of time in aligning accents (using my optical centre adjustment tip for some glyphs). I have further improved CompositeData.xml while making this font, and will pass those improvements on later.
Updated with OpenType versions. I also fixed some incorrect mappings of a few ligatures, and added a few more. The Typeface Sample PDF has also been updated.
If anyone uses OpenType aware applications I will be interested to hear if they actually work. I added OpenType features with the OpenType Compiler and tested them in the TrueType Viewer from the same author.
However, I am new to this, and may have made some errors.
Note that OpenType fonts do not use the OTF icon in Windows unless they have been digitally signed. They are installed just like TTF fonts, by copying to the Windows Fonts folder, or by using MainType.
Now that PagePlus X5 supports OpenType features, I am in the process of updating my free fonts. Even if you don’t have PagePlus, you can install and use the fonts, but you won’t be able to use the extra Smart Font technology to access the extra glyphs unless you have a program that supports those features. They can still be inserted using Insert Symbol or Windows Character map.
Added OpenType Feature for Fractions, Alternative (Stacking) Fractions, Alternative Annotation forms, Petite Capitals, Petite Capitals from Capitals, Ornaments, Ordinals, Superscripts, Scientific Inferiors, Titling Capitals, Discretionary Ligatures, Historical Ligatures, Standard Ligatures, and Stylistic Alternates.
Added several Miscellaneous Symbols to complete the set in line with the Unicode Standard version 6.0.
Is there any particular advantage to using a stylistic set for the Caduceus wand, instead of accessing it as a Unicode character at codepoint U+2624 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block?
The next version will have a double exclamation mark instead of the Caduceus wand. Maybe I will find something else instead of the East Syria cross too, but the Warning sign uni26A0 is already used ins Salt1.
Version 2.90 was greatly improved using FontCreator 10.1
I removed the Titling Capital glyphs and replaced them with a GPOS Titling feature. This doesn’t work in PagePlus, but one can simply use expanded character spacing.
Localized forms were added for Romanian
Ligatures were added for fij and ij acute, which are used in Dutch.
The Web versions are unhinted, contain no Small Capitals or Alternative Fractions, and only a few symbols.
Lowercase i and j caron composite glyphs now use smaller and more appropriate lowprofilecaron accents.
Small Capital and Petite Capital glyphs with cedilla and ogonek now use smaller accents as defined in the updated CompositeData.xml — they are 90% and 80% respectively of the accents for regular capitals.
The height of some symbols was adjusted for Regular and Italic styles to match the CapHeight.
The currency symbols for Turkish Lira and Georgian Lari were replaced with new designed based on SVG files from Wikipedia
Some Symbols were improved with fewer points, and more consistent spacing.
The precedence of OpenType feature was improved to prevent discretionary or historical ligatures being used when ordinal, or small and petite capitals are enabled.
Many more kerning pairs were added and kerning classes were improved.
More glyphs use composites to reduce file sizes, and make future editing easier.
A few more Easter-eggs were added. Let me know if you find them!?
Obviously not. This looks like a serious bug. I get the same results from 2.91, which I am still editing. Balava, which I published only days ago, also with FontCreator 10.1 exports the kerning tables OK.
Version 2.91 fixes the kerning bug, which is in my font, not in FontCreator.
I now know exactly how it happened. While using the Validation in the Code Editor I manually added a value of -20 in a couple of places to remove the warning messages. However, I entered it for the XAdvance of the second member of the pair, instead of the first. This was sufficient to break the export of the kerning table. There’s a lot to be said for using the Visual Designer, which makes it hard to introduce such errors. Manual coding is always error-prone. The way that I work also imported the errors from Pali Regular to all three other type styles.
Version 3.00 improved some ogonek contours, added four glyphs with ogonek for Nordic, and added some more kerning pairs. Version 2.92 did not fix all of the bugs I had to fix some more for version 3.00.
Microsign µ was included in the Greek alpha kerning class instead of Greek mu
Discretionary ligature st in italics had the wrong right side-bearing
Standard ligatures tt, tty, fty, ttr, ty did not match in all type styles
Standard ligatures were missing ky ligature
I added kerning pairs for Italic Vb, Wb, Yb, etc., which clash badly without positive kerning. Though they are pairs that are unlikely to be used in practice.
Lowercase y. clashes with comma, so I separate that from the y_lc kerning class
I added back Unicode spaces and some composite glyphs to the Web and WOFF versions, since they add very little to the file size.
I ran Autokern and rechecked the kerning on all pairs.
Version 3.20 replaced the Romanian localised forms (which are not supported in PagePlus) with a Stylistic Set. Irony punctuation reversed question mark is a Standard Ligature substitution for ??, while Interrobang replaces ?! and inverse interrobang replaces ¿¡. Super/subscript glyphs (×÷) and thin space were added for use with fractions. Kerning pairs were added for subscripts and fractions that use them. Character Variants were improved and are now included in the Web and WOFF versions.
Version 3.31 fixed a few kerning pairs and added WOFF2 versions as well as WOFF1.
The WOFF fonts are unhinted to minimize on file size. The OTF Web versions are hinted, but have fewer glyphs than the full OTF versions.
I had to fix some more for version 3.00.
