Preloaded, User-Created, and Drag-and-Drop Glyph Mappings using Formulas

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Requests and Enhancements
1

Hi everyone
Looking to minimize filesize on some old fonts and doing a lot of glyph mapping using Formulas.

For example, making all uppercase A variations (Aring, Agrave, Aacute, etc) map to A 0065. All uppercase E variations map to E. Currently shift+ and ctrl+ clicking glyphs and then hitting the Formula button, setting them equal one glyph at a time.

Why not have user created maps that I can activate with one button? Here are some great ones:

  • all uppercase letters to the basic 26 uppercase
  • all lowercase letters to the basic 26 lowercase
  • basic 26 lowercase letters get mapped to the uppercase version

Why not set the formula for a selection of glyphs by dragging and dropping them onto the glyph that they are to be set equal to?

I tried to set up an FCP file as a template, but it means editing the Font Info and Metrics every time I use it.

Hope this is something workable.

Have a good one,

2

Why would anyone want to map all accented vowels to their base glyph? :confused:

To copy all lower case mappings to uppercase, just use copy and paste special.

3

I would be happy to answer that question for you. And not just vowels, but all accented characters:

  • Because for quite a few glyphs, Complete Composites won’t map anything without diacritics


  • Because not all clients pay for diacritics


  • Because not all fonts are profitable enough to develop and align diacritics


  • Because it reduces the amount of work required to stop .notdef showing up in non-English languages


  • Because at least one of your competitors (Fontself) has it as the default setting in their software: all accented glyphs are mapped to the source glyph unless you specifically design for the accented glyph. Assume they did their own research.

I hope that helps.

4

A better approach is to map the composite characters to the base glyph, e.g. set code-points of A to:

$41, $C0, $C1, $C2, $C3, $C4, $C5

Note: this is not something we recommend, but in your case this might work.

5

I can’t set the code points of A. I can set the code points of $41 to A, then $C0 to A, then $C2 to A using formulas, but it takes forever.

Or I can edit the Composites XML file, but then it would be a permanent change, not something that I could apply for some clients, and not for others.

This is why it makes for such a great Feature Request.

6

Just set codepoints for A to:
$41, $C0-$C5, $0100, $0102, $0104, $1EA0

Then delete the composites, as those are no longer in use.

I understand this is tedious, but it is bad practice, so we don’t want to facilitate it too much.